Analyst Onboarding Task List & 30/60/90 Learning Path

Welcome

This checklist turns the Analyst Onboarding Journey into an actionable plan you can follow, adapt, and measure. Use it to reduce ramp time, avoid repeated questions, and align early analyst work with real stakeholder decisions. Each task includes suggested owners, expected evidence (what 'done' looks like), and an estimated target window (days since start).

How to use this checklist

• Adapt ownership and timelines to your organization. Replace generic names with local roles.
• Expect variation by seniority and role (data analyst, reporting analyst, analytics engineer, data scientist).
• Capture evidence for each completed item (links to tickets, screenshots, queries, dashboards, or short notes).

Technical setup (Day 0–7)

1. Provision accounts and credentials
   • Owner: IT / Platform Admin
   • Evidence: Active accounts for email, SSO, ticketing, source control, CI, cloud console, BI tool.
   • Acceptance: Can log in to required systems and access a basic sandbox dataset.
2. Developer environment
   • Owner: Platform or Team Tech Lead
   • Tasks: Install IDE, language runtimes, package manager, repo clone, local config file with sample credentials.
   • Evidence: Successful local run of a sample ETL/query and ability to open notebooks/dashboards.
3. Access to code & pipeline repositories
   • Owner: Engineering Lead
   • Evidence: Read (and where appropriate, write) access to repos and CI pipelines; successful pull request checklist run.
4. Access to query tool and BI environments
   • Owner: BI Admin
   • Evidence: Ability to run queries, view scheduled jobs, and open main dashboards.

Data access, catalogs & business context (Day 1–14)

1. Register with data catalog & review core datasets
   • Owner: Data Steward
   • Evidence: Viewed descriptions for top 8–12 domain tables, noted owners and SLAs.
   • Acceptance: Able to list where customer, product, transaction, and time-series data live.
2. Business glossary and metric definitions
   • Owner: Analytics Lead / Product Owner
   • Evidence: Read core metric definitions (e.g., ARR, active users, OEE) and mapping to source fields.
   • Acceptance: Can explain three key business metrics to a stakeholder and show their lineage to source tables.
3. Security & governance briefing
   • Owner: Security or Data Governance
   • Evidence: Completed data handling checklist, understood PII rules, and knows how to request exceptions.

First learning projects (Day 7–45)

Early projects should teach the stack, data model, and decision context rather than only tooling.

1. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) task
   • Goal: Build curiosity about data quality and common patterns.
   • Deliverable: Short EDA notebook/report highlighting missing values, key distributions, and 3–5 surprising findings.
   • Acceptance: Feedback session with mentor; identified one data quality issue or clarification to file as a ticket.
2. Metric replication exercise
   • Goal: Recreate an existing business metric and show lineage.
   • Deliverable: SQL or notebook that reproduces a dashboard metric, plus a short doc showing source-to-metric lineage.
   • Acceptance: Metric matches dashboard within tolerance and reviewer confirms lineage clarity.
3. Simple dashboard or report
   • Goal: Deliver a decision-focused visualization that answers one clear stakeholder question.
   • Deliverable: Draft dashboard, one-pager explanation, and insights/recommendations.
   • Acceptance: Stakeholder review and signed-off next action or follow-up question list.

Mentorship, reviews & feedback cadence

• Pairing: Assign a primary mentor for weekly pairing sessions (first 30 days) and a secondary reviewer for technical reviews.
• Weekly 1:1s: Establish recurring check-ins with manager focusing on priorities, blockers, and wellbeing.
• Code & deliverable reviews: Use the team's PR template and review checklist for reproducibility, tests, and documentation.
• Acceptance: At 30 days mentee completes the agreed EDA and metric replication with mentor sign-off.

Documentation, code & collaboration standards

• Read and follow the team's code style guide, branching model, and commit message conventions.
• Register notebooks, queries, and dashboards in the catalog with descriptions and owners.
• Evidence: First three contributions follow standards and pass automated checks.

Suggested 30/60/90 goals (role-adapted)

30 days

• Complete technical setup and access. Deliver EDA and metric replication. Clear documentation of 2–3 dataset lineages.

60 days

• Own a small dashboard or data product, respond to one stakeholder request end-to-end, and propose one improvement to a metric or pipeline.

90 days

• Lead an iteration of a dashboard feature, onboard a peer to a dataset, and present a short retrospective with tangible next steps for the team.

Assessment & acceptance checklist

Use these criteria to decide if the new analyst is ready for wider responsibilities.

• Technical: Able to run and modify existing ETL/queries and create reproducible artifacts.
• Domain: Can explain key business metrics and their data sources.
• Delivery: Has produced at least one stakeholder-accepted deliverable that led to a decision or action.
• Collaboration: Participates in reviews and follows team standards.

Example artifacts to collect

• Links to EDA notebook and metric replication SQL.
• Draft dashboard link and one-pager insight summary.
• List of opened tickets for data issues and governance requests.

Suggested role & RACI templates (brief)

Map core early activities to roles like Analyst, Mentor, Team Lead, Data Steward, and BI Admin. Keep responsibilities concrete (e.g., 'provide access', 'approve metric lineage', 'review dashboard draft').

Common pitfalls & tips

• Don’t start by building many dashboards — pick one decision and prove impact.
• Prioritize understanding lineage and definitions before optimizing queries.
• File small tickets for data issues. Good ticket hygiene accelerates future work.

Next steps for teams (optional tailoring)

Teams should adapt this checklist: change timelines for senior hires, add local security requirements, and link to site-specific onboarding artifacts. Consider packaging this as a reusable domain collection for your organization so sites can copy and tailor it.