What Do Data Analyst Job Postings Actually Ask For?

A small scrape + Claude extraction + analysis pipeline.

Posted by August 05, 2026 · 2 mins read

Project:

Code Repository

I wanted to try a small end-to-end pipeline: pull real job postings, have an LLM (Claude) read the unstructured descriptions and pull out structured skills/tools, then see what actually shows up most. Here's what I found looking at 18 current "Data Analyst" postings pulled from RemoteOK's public job API.

Method

  1. Fetch: Queried RemoteOK's public API (remoteok.com/api) across a few relevant tags (analytics, data, sql, business-intelligence), de-duplicated results, and filtered down to postings whose title matched Data Analyst / BI Analyst / Analytics Engineer patterns.

  2. Extract: Each posting's raw HTML description is cleaned up and passed to Claude with a prompt asking it to return structured JSON — the specific tools/skills mentioned, seniority level, employment type, and salary range if stated. This is the part that would be painful with regex alone, since postings phrase requirements very differently.

  3. Aggregate: Counted how often each skill appeared across postings and charted the top ones.

What showed up most

Top skills chart

  1. Excel — mentioned in 11/18 postings (61%)
  2. SQL — mentioned in 10/18 postings (56%)
  3. Python — mentioned in 8/18 postings (44%)
  4. Tableau — mentioned in 8/18 postings (44%)
  5. Power BI — mentioned in 8/18 postings (44%)
  6. Looker — mentioned in 4/18 postings (22%)
  7. ETL — mentioned in 4/18 postings (22%)
  8. Pandas — mentioned in 4/18 postings (22%)
  9. Snowflake — mentioned in 3/18 postings (17%)
  10. BigQuery — mentioned in 3/18 postings (17%)

A few observations

Excel and SQL are still the baseline expectation, not just Python — worth remembering if a portfolio leans all-Python.

Power BI and Tableau show up about equally often; it may not be worth over-specializing in just one BI tool.

Cloud warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) show up in a meaningful minority of postings — a "nice to have" signal for standing out, not yet a baseline requirement in this sample.

Caveats

This is a small, single-snapshot sample (18 postings) from one job board that skews toward remote/tech-forward companies, so it's directional, not a market survey. Re-running this weekly and tracking how the skill mix shifts over time would be a more convincing follow-up.

    Tools & Process:

  • Python
  • RemoteOK Public API
  • Claude (Anthropic API)
  • Pandas
  • Matplotlib
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