I'll second Vlad's comment. Programming skills arent about to be required (you will never be as good as a true developer), but having a decent understanding / being able to run simple queries is and will remain a differentiator.

Case in point: i have a former Goldman Sachs guy in my bus dev team today, and his knowledge of Tableau + coding skills arent enough for him to develop brand new reports, but make us semi-independent when we want a specific data point. As a result, he has huge value to not only my team, but also even to accounting and finace (who can't always get what they need from Big Data guys). Guess who woll be the first to get a recognition, salary bump or promotion?

It very much depends on the industry.

In very industries with huge amount of data (Banking, Telecommunications) - advanced data analysis is beneficial, however in sectors goods producing sectors the amount of useful data is not so high and therefore data analytics is not that crucial

Hello!

In McKinsey, we used Excel 99.5% of the cases -the Advance Analytics hub took care of the more difficult stuff-.

In Amazon however, people regularly know SQL on top of Excel.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara