So I recently fell upward into an analyst position at work, and while there's a big push towards Power BI, apparently a significant chunk of our data lives on Cognos Analytics. From what I've been able to gather, someone set up some reports pre-covid and people have just been using those reports ever since. The guy who set them up left the company a while ago, and nobody knows how to do anything with this EXCEPT run those reports. I'd like to get a handle on it.

Unfortunately, I am a very small cog in a very large machine so I don't have access to stuff like setting up my own data modules (I am not trained in data science or whatever, I'm a techy guy with google), and the data I DO have feels like it's all over the place and not labeled particularly well.

Do you folks have any links that might be helpful to me as a newbie, trying to wrap my head around how this is supposed to work? Tips and/or tricks for massaging the data into legible reports? I'll take anything at this point.

Neither Power BI nor Cognos Analytics contain data.  Based on your level of data and analytics experience, and your level of permissions, I'm thinking either working directly with your Cognos Analytics administrator or hiring a contractor would be your best option.