Recently, I visited my alma mater, University of Florida in Gainesville, FL, to speak with advertising students about digital marketing, analytics and how to start a career in our field. As I had expected, I received many questions from students, both after my talk and via email.

Silicon Valley loves fancy job titles. It’s just something we do, and software and technology lend themselves to it. But it’s not always helpful. In many cases, these new titles are simply a reinventing or coopting of a practice that is already well-served by existing practitioners.

I know readers here are a really busy group, but after 9 years of blogging consistently, then not publishing for several months some of you may have wondered what happened. Rest assured I’m fine and have no plans to stop sharing my ideas here.

As I’ve been writing about tools and tactics quite a bit lately, I thought for this month’s column I’d take a step back and share some ideas on how you can become a better analyst.

If you don’t have a boss that expects you to deliver results reports on your programs today, you will in the future. But regardless of your current organization’s sophistication with marketing analytics, there’s no reason you shouldn’t step up and report results like a boss.

I’m not going to repeat the exact details of what happened on June 14 2016. They were horrifying. 49 people innocent people died because a man who was previously on the terrorist watchlist was able to purchase a weapon.