# What employers ask for

These counts come from 24 job postings for analyst roles in and around Boston, read on **September 7, 2026** off the [Built In Boston](https://www.builtinboston.com/jobs/data-analytics) job board. Of those, 19 were open that day, two carried no date, and three had already closed and are marked as such below.

A count here means one thing. The term appears in that posting's qualifications section. It does not mean the employer requires it, and two postings from the same company can disagree. Liberty Mutual's two do.

One job board is one slice of the market. Built In leans toward technology employers, so hospitals, health insurers and asset managers are thinner here than they are in Boston hiring generally. A second board, further down, carries the hospitals, and it gives a different answer.

## Who was in the sample

The sample covers employers of every size, and the tool list turns out to depend on which one you join:

- **20,000 people and up.** PwC, Pfizer, ZS, M&T Bank, Liberty Mutual (two postings).
- **4,000 to 10,000.** Ahold Delhaize USA, PTC, SharkNinja, Fidelity, Takeda.
- **400 to 2,400.** Klaviyo, Rapid7, Mimecast, CarGurus, Workhuman, WHOOP, OpenX.
- **Under 350.** Hometap, Bevi, MarketOnce.
- **Closed before the reading, kept and labeled.** DraftKings, Wayfair (two postings from 2025).

Massachusetts requires a salary range on a posting, so the ranges come from the postings themselves. They run from $64,000 to $80,000 for an entry analyst job at DraftKings, through $85,000 to $110,000 for a business analyst at WHOOP with one to two years of experience, up to $163,000 to $272,000 for a senior role at Pfizer.

## What every posting names

| named in the qualifications | postings |
|---|---|
| SQL | 17 of 24 |
| a visualization or BI product | 14 |
| Python | 11 |
| a spreadsheet (Excel, Sheets, VBA) | 10 |
| a cloud warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift) | 10 |
| AI or generative AI | 10 |
| R | 6 |
| dbt or a pipeline orchestrator | 5 |
| Alteryx | 3 |
| git | 3 |
| statistics or experiment design | 3 |
| SAS | 2 |

SQL appears in more of these postings than anything else, and the wording is rarely soft. CarGurus asks for "advanced SQL" and "production-grade SQL". Where Python appears it is often one option among several, written as "Python or R" or listed under preferred qualifications.

Three further postings ask for dashboards or business intelligence tools without naming a product, so the count for any kind of visualization work is 17 and the count for a named product is 14.

## What changes with the employer

Among the 14 postings naming a visualization product, Tableau appears eight times, Power BI six, and Looker five, with Omni, Sigma, ThoughtSpot, Visier and Google Data Studio once each. Among the 10 naming a warehouse, Snowflake appears six times and BigQuery four.

Then there are the systems that belong to one industry. Fidelity's posting names FactSet, Bloomberg, Morningstar and Barra Portfolio Manager. PTC's names Workday and five of its reporting features. CarGurus and Mimecast name Salesforce. Bevi names NetSuite. Ahold Delhaize names a supply chain optimization stack of AIMMS, CPLEX, Gurobi, SAP APO and Blue Yonder. M&T Bank and ZS both name SAS, which none of the technology companies do. Alteryx appears at M&T Bank, Ahold Delhaize and PwC, all three of them among the largest employers here.

None of that is learnable in advance. Most of those systems appear once in the sample, and SQL appears in 17 postings.

## What they ask for without naming a tool

| phrase family | postings |
|---|---|
| the word "communication" | 19 of 24 |
| explaining to a non-technical or executive audience | 14 |
| attention to detail | 9 |
| ownership, initiative, a bias for action | 9 |
| handling several requests at once | 7 |
| process improvement | 7 |
| curiosity | 5 |
| structuring a problem that arrives vague | 4 |

The second row is where the postings get specific:

- PTC wants somebody who can "communicate complex findings to executive and non-technical audiences".
- Rapid7 asks for "bridging technical details and business priorities", and later for "translating complex business requests".
- Mimecast asks you to "translate data into clear, actionable recommendations", with "confidence presenting findings directly to functional leaders".
- M&T Bank asks you to "translate business questions into analytical solutions".
- Ahold Delhaize asks for the ability to "influence without authority".
- Wayfair asks for a "strong ability to structure ambiguous problems", and CarGurus for a "proven ability to turn ambiguous questions into clear analyses".

Attention to detail is asked for in nine postings, and two of them say what they mean by it. Fidelity's names "data quality validation and anomaly detection" and "rule-based exception processing". Bevi's asks for an "instinct to fix the root cause".

## What the postings say about AI

AI or generative AI is named in 10 of the 24, and those 10 span the whole sample: Bevi at 252 people and PwC at 370,000, an entry business analyst job and a lead analyst job.

Nine of the 10 ask for a way of working with the tools. WHOOP's entry business analyst posting lists "strong commitment to embracing and leveraging AI tools" as a qualification. Workhuman asks for "hands-on use of generative AI" and names AI coding tools and conversational analytics. SharkNinja asks for "AI-assisted development" and puts the responsibility for using coding assistants responsibly on the person doing it. Bevi names ChatGPT and Claude directly.

One of the 10, Klaviyo, asks for the engineering underneath: LangChain, the OpenAI SDK, HuggingFace, prompt engineering, fine-tuning and retrieval pipelines. That job pays $120,000 to $180,000 and asks for a lead analyst.

## What a hospital asks for

The [MassTech health IT board](https://jobs.mehi.masstech.org/jobs) carries hospitals and health systems, and seven of its postings were read on **September 8, 2026**. They sit apart from the 24 above, because much of what this board files under "analyst" is Epic configuration and workforce system support, which is a different job.

Read the employer out of the description before you trust the label. This board files one Boston Medical Center posting under two company names, and files Mass General Brigham postings under a community health center. The Trauma data Analyst below names "North Shore Medical Center, Inc." in its body, and North Shore is a Mass General Brigham member hospital.

- **SAS is required** at Mass General Brigham's Data Analyst I or II, alongside SQL, Tableau, Epic, Medicare and Medicaid claims data, and logistic and linear regression. SAS appears in two of the 24 postings above and is required in neither.
- **Epic runs through all of it.** It is the electronic health record, and in a hospital it holds the data.
- **The cloud stack appears at the senior end.** Beth Israel Lahey Health's Senior Data Analyst names Snowflake, SQL tools and PowerBI, at $74,880 to $124,800.
- **Excel and Access hold the bottom.** The Trauma data Analyst at North Shore asks for a high school diploma, MS Access and Excel, and pays $17.71 to $25.28 an hour.
- **None of the seven names AI.** Three were checked across the whole page text, including the benefits boilerplate. AI is named in 10 of the 24 above.
- **Entry pay is lower.** Mass General Brigham's Data Analyst I pays $53,040 to $75,888. WHOOP's entry business analyst pays $85,000 to $110,000.

## What this course covers

The course covers Python from the first week, SQL from October, and git every week, along with reading a dataset you did not create and checking a figure you did not compute.

Tableau, Power BI and Looker get no session here, and neither do Omni, Sigma, ThoughtSpot, Visier or Google Data Studio. Each of them sits on top of a query, and the query is where the time goes.

Only three postings name git, which is fewer than any other tool in the table. The course uses it every week, because it is where your work lives and how somebody else opens it.

## Checking this yourself

The sample came off three listing pages, and they are worth an hour of your own time in October when the postings have turned over:

- [Built In Boston, data and analytics](https://www.builtinboston.com/jobs/data-analytics)
- [Built In Boston, data analyst](https://www.builtinboston.com/jobs/data-analytics/search/data-analyst)
- [Built In Boston, business analyst](https://www.builtinboston.com/jobs/data-analytics/search/business-analyst)
- [MassTech health IT board](https://jobs.mehi.masstech.org/jobs), for the hospitals

LinkedIn and Indeed are the obvious places to look and neither one worked here. Indeed answers a request from a script with an error. LinkedIn gives a company and a title and then asks you to sign in, so the qualifications section, which is where every count above comes from, stays behind the wall.

Individual postings come down within weeks, so links to them break. Open a listing page, read 10 postings in a row, and count the qualifications sections. Read them in a batch and you can see which words every employer uses and which ones belong to one company.

If your count disagrees with the table above, bring it to a lightning talk.