Hi, I’m Jen.
I’m going to walk you through my analytics career path, starting with getting hired as
an analyst, moving through other analytical roles, and then taking a director level position
in a large, international corporation.
I hope that my analytics career journey will inspire you to think outside the box about
the path that your own career could take.
It might give you some ideas of areas you hadn’t thought of before and help you craft
where you want to go on your analytics journey.
If you’re exploring your career or you’re ready to take the next steps to getting a
new job, check back each week.
We post twice a week videos here at The Career Force focusing on everything related to analytics
careers.
I’ve always liked data, facts, and logical problems, so it made a lot of sense when I
decided to become an analyst for my career.
My educational background is a Bachelor's degree in math with a minor in economics.
A lot of numbers but also a lot of logic.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that upper level math classes really are as much
about the logical reasoning as they are about any numbers or letters.
My first career position after college was as a data analyst.
In that position, I did a lot of data analysis, data science work, but also a lot of business
analysis type work.
That’s going to vary a little bit position to position.
Different companies implement these roles in different ways.
For me it was a lot of problem solving, given different things to look at and come up with
solutions.
I really enjoyed that work.
There were a few things that I focused on in this position which I think really helped
me prepare for the next position I’d take.
The first is, I really built up my programming skills.
I unfortunately didn’t go into this position knowing how to do much programming.
But I self taught a lot of SAS, as well as some other programming languages.
SAS was the main language used at the company I was working for at the time.
I worked on that.
The other big thing I spent a lot of time on and has benefited me throughout my career
is really building up my network.
Especially when you’re new to a company or to the working world in general, you need
to build your connections.
You’re going to find so much information from these people, and you’ll probably find
that a lot of them are really willing to help you out and help you take the next steps in
your career.
I built my network.
I also looked for opportunities for leadership.
While I wasn’t managing anyone, there were always opportunities where I could take responsibility
for something that was maybe normally outside of my scope but would help out the team or
help out the company and really show those around me that I was willing to go outside
of my day to day boxed in job responsibilities and really make things happen.
Within a year, I was promoted.
I took on a role in a financial analyst position focused mainly on warranty.
For those that aren’t familiar, it’s really similar to the insurance industry.
You’re trying to predict what’s going to happen and how much it’s going to cost
so that you can make sure that you’re properly charging for things and you’re properly
reserving the amount of money.
I spent a lot of time focusing on my predictive analytics skills here and got really good at
it.
I was able to do predictions that were having error rates of less than 2%, which is pretty
good.
For anyone who has done predictions, you know it can be difficult to be that accurate.
I spent a lot of time building those skills, also working on my data visualization skills
so I could communicate with the rest of business team.
This business analyst/financial analyst role wasn’t something that was common information
to the rest of the organization.
While there certainly were other people doing this type of work, there were a lot of people
that it was kind of magic behind the scenes as to how it got done.
It was really important to be able to communicate the results.
I also looked for opportunities to again take on more leadership roles.
For me, this meant taking leadership classes, it meant getting involved in some organizational
development activities and really taking extra time that stretched my workday to be
able to really go into the organization and lead and build my network, and that paid off
huge.
The next position which was actually within a year of that promotion, was moving into
a manager role.
I was managing the financial analysts and data analysts with regards to warranty and
quality.
In that role I still worked on my technical skills, but I also got a chance to manage
analysts.
I had a lot of fun doing that work.
It’s really good when you’re in a good team of analysts, the comradery that’s built
and the way you can bounce ideas off each other, and find new ways to solve different
problems.
In that role I continued to build my skills.
I focused more on data visualization, more on communication, because a lot of the activities
I was doing were going to higher and higher levels.
They were going to the board members of the organization, they were going to the CEO of
the organization, so it really had to be accurate, clear and concise, because it was rarely me
delivering the information.
I might have to pass it up a few levels of the organization and give that person enough
information that they could really talk articulately about what was going on.
The other thing I did at this point in my career was I got more involved in the industry.
There are a lot of organizations for pretty much any industry you can think of.
In my case, I got more involved in the warranty industry, and specifically in the warranty
analytics industry.
I spoke at conferences, I wrote papers, I got connected with the people who made the
software, and this really helped me learn a lot, but it also gave me in some cases information
as to what tools might be coming out, it let me give feedback to the software makers about
what I saw could be done in the business, and the other thing I did was help build different
training.
Training on financial predictions, financial analysis, data modeling that has been implemented
in the industry.
At this point in my career, I was about 4.5 years out of college, I was on my third position,
and getting ready to transition to my fourth.
I don’t think this type of career growth would have been possible without me having
some fundamental strong background in analytics and being able to do the logical work that
came with it, but the other thing that has been a huge help throughout my career is being
willing to step up and do more.
To stretch, to grow myself, to make connections with people.
This goes a long way to helping you take steps in your career, even when you don’t see
what that position might be.
With both of those positions I just talked about after my first one, they didn’t in some cases even exist until they
were created for me, and it
came about largely because I was
doing things outside of my comfort zone, I was going above and beyond.
So don’t just look at it as, “What’s the next position I’m going to be in?”
It’s great to plan ahead, but also do things without expecting something in return in your
career.
And they're going to be noticed.
Your managers are going to notice.
Managers around you are going to notice.
And it really stands out when people are doing an exceptional job, and it’s really is noticed
when people aren’t just doing the minimum that they can do to get by.
All of these skills definitely didn’t come naturally to me at first.
While I definitely like experimenting with different things and solving problems, I’m
not naturally much of an extravert, so it takes energy for me to go out and talk
with other people.
And connecting with other people doesn’t mean that you need to be buddy buddy or really
personal about things.
You can still talk about work and be friendly with people and grow that network.
It will really serve you a long way in the future.
Even if you change companies, that doesn’t mean your network at the old company is doing
you a disservice.
They can still be people that your reach out to as resources, they can vouch for you for
future positions.
It’s a great network to have.
After all of that, the next position - so we’re on the 4th position now and about
4.5 years out of college, I moved into a global role.
This was really interesting because I had always been at a global company, but I was
always focused a little more locally.
In this role I became part of an executive management team across 7 different sites globally.
We were in the majority of the major time zones that are out there.
In this role I focused a lot on process improvement and on analytics.
One of the beautiful skills you have if you’re a good analyst is your very process driven
and you’re very logical about how you can solve problems.
In this role I was able to do a lot of work to standardize globally how we were working.
I worked with analysts at all of the sites.
I was able to streamline some different things, identify best practices at different sites,
combine them, take the best of everything and really implement them so that we could globally
have the best result.
Again, I think this is something that came from networking and building my skills, going
out and doing above and beyond what my job called for.
I might be working with someone in the US on site face to face in the afternoon, and
then the next morning I might be working with someone who is twelve time zones away from
me.
It’s a great chance to build both your knowledge of how people work, but also your communication
skills because there are differences in how we communicate across cultures and how we
properly convey information.
There’s also so much to be learned from working with a wide variety of people, and
with companies becoming increasingly global, it’s a fantastic skill to have.
You need to be able to communicate well, both in writing, and when you’re talking with
people and in your visualization of data, even if someone is not right there with you.
It’s sometimes nice to be able to write on a whiteboard all your logic for how you
solved a problem, but other times you might need to be able to articulate the exact steps
you followed fairly simply and in writing to someone that maybe it’s not convenient
to actually call.
So again in this role, one of the things I did was look at the industry and what I could
do.
It was some connection still with this global training, with the industry training and knowledge,
but it was also getting involved with graduate analytics programs and helping walk students
who were going to become analysts through solving different business specific problems.
I think this is a great skill for people entering a new career to have.
If you haven’t ever taken the time to solve a business problem, there’s probably going
to be more of a learning curve.
What I’ve found in working with analysts and hiring analysts is ones who are recently
out of school with no business application, often are fantastic at applying research methods,
but they might struggle a little bit with the ambiguity that often comes with business
questions.
Getting some real world business practice can be really good for you.
Even if you don’t have a specific business problem, take a problem that you do have where
you don’t have all the information and apply those analytical skills to it.
I held this position in my global role for about four years, and after that I took on
a director role within the warranty organization.
My responsibilities were for everything produced in North America, which was a very large part
of the business that I was a part of.
I had a team that spanned two different sites within the US.
There was a lot that went back to those communication skills and networking skills I had built early
on in my career.
I managed teams of analysts in that position, trying to solve different problems, trying
to identify problems of what might be going on before they became big problems.
I also did a lot with negotiating with suppliers.
Both contracts and settlements for different financial issues.
For me this is where my analytics skills again came in handy.
I can logically reason through a problem, I can build a logical case, and that’s a
great skill to have in negotiation related roles.
It might not be immediately obvious how an analyst would move into a director role that
was more focused on suppliers and negotiation, which was the role I ended up in, but there
were lots of steps along the way that led me to that point and allowed me to be extremely
successful in that role.
Something you might be wondering is what kind of connections did I have that got me these jobs?
And the truth is, not many.
This was a job I found and applied for, and then my skills and the value that I was adding
to the company helped propel me further along in my career.
So while I certainly had a lot of things that I had been fortunate to give me advantages,
I didn’t have anyone waiting to hand me a job.
I applied for the job, I wrote a resume, I built my skills, I learned about the industry,
and all of these things really helped propel me forward in my career.
Why am I not in that director role today?
Well I really want to switch gears and help other people experience the same success that
I have.
I truly believe there are a lot of really skilled people out there, especially in the analytics
world that maybe just need a little help finessing their resume, finessing their approach to
their career path, so they can build themselves a successful career.
If that sounds like you, I’d love to connect with you and help you.
If you’re not quite to the point where you’re ready to work with my one on one, I do have
a guide that will walk you through my top steps to growing your career, and you can
get that in the link below.
If you are ready to work with me one on one and grow your career, I would love to talk
with you about how I can help you work through that.
I’ll link below so you can connect with me, or reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we
can talk about what I can do to help you have the same career success.