Data analyst is the most accessible entry point into the data career track, and in Pune it draws as many career switchers from commerce and operations backgrounds as it does engineering graduates. The work is SQL, spreadsheets and a BI tool, applied to real business questions — why did a region underperform, which customers are churning. Employers screen far more for the ability to explain a finding clearly than for modelling sophistication. A portfolio of two or three dashboards built on messy public data beats a stack of certificates.