analysis seems more interesting but if you have ANY knowledge of either to share that would be great
Well, both actually. When I was working at a brokerage, the brokers were constantly trying to sell and up-sell. Follow-up requirements for all new clients and potential clients (garnered from various sources) were 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 months, and 45 days. I always thought this was over-kill and would just alienate people. Depending on the type of brokerage, you could be salary, full commission, or somewhere between. It takes a lot of hours and even years to get a decently steady stream of income when on full commission. I had a friend who made $10k (gross) one month and then went on to make
NOTHING for four months. Typical commission per month in the first few years tend to be small in relation to the time put in. Expect to work 6 days a week 10 hours a day for the first few years to make $30-45k a year.
As far as analysis, it tends to be tedious solitary work, but can be very rewarding if you like spotting patterns or finding errors/inconsistencies. Right now I am working on a project where we are migrating our Oracle SQL reports to MySQL. For the most part, syntax is 90% the same. However, it still makes it difficult to rewrite them to work correctly. I spent my day verifying that the reports re-written into MySQL were working correctly. I made it through four of them in an 8 hour shift. Lots of repetition and a necessity of understanding, not only how the reports work and are written, but also a thorough understanding of the underlying data.
One of the most important aspects of analysis is having a thorough understanding of the underlying data. Anybody can run the calculations and do the comparisons, but without the thorough understanding of everything pertaining to the data, you would not be an analyst.
In my opinion, having a solid understanding of databases is paramount for a good analyst. Pre-configured reports don't always have all the data you are looking for and combining reports is tedious. Being able to write new reports on the fly will set a good analyst apart from the rest. On top of that, knowing VBA will do the same for analysis work in Excel.