You know more than your job title suggests
If you have spent years in production support, you have written more ad-hoc SQL than most junior analysts. You have also seen which numbers the business panics about, which is genuinely useful context that a fresh analytics graduate does not have.
The problem is not capability. It is that “Support Engineer” reads as reactive, and analytics hiring managers are screening for people who ask questions rather than answer tickets.
The three gaps to close
Visualisation. Power BI or Tableau, to a level where you can build a model, not just a chart. The modelling half is what employers pay for.
Statistics. Enough to know when a difference is noise, how to design an A/B test, and why the average is often the wrong summary.
Business framing. Turning “why are sales down?” into a question you can actually answer with data, then presenting the answer so someone acts on it.
Reframing the support experience
Stop describing what you fixed. Start describing what you noticed. The engineer who says “I saw the same failure recur every month-end and traced it to a batch job overlap” is describing analytical work, whatever their title said.
Timeline
Four to six months alongside a full-time job. Shorter than most transitions, because the SQL foundation is already there.