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I started as an Analyst and I am now in the position of product/application development.
I started with manually pulling information from proprietary or third party programs, diddling the data into correct formats, dumping them into excel, and making beautiful charts and reports from them, similar to you.
I got really tired of doing that kind of stuff after some time, and wanted a more automated environment. So I learned VBA, then SQL, then generally got more into databases and scripting, and finally programming.
I always stay in contact with my former colleagues, on the other hand, and we all ended up in vastly different career paths... One ended up as a portfolio manager and another ended up as a director of logistics. So, just concentrate on what you want to do or not do at the end of the day and how to do that. I didn't want to pull or manipulate data manually all the time, leading me to my current direction.
