Insider profil
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Top Insider Advice
Throughout my career I’ve been on a learning journey regarding how I communicate. When I first started out, I was very shy and found it difficult to communicate confidently. I’d be nervous sending an email to someone I’d never met and spend hours over-analysing the content to make sure it was ‘perfect’ before sending it. As I sent more and more emails, met more people, and put myself out there for presentations, I grew in confidence but I still had a lot to learn. I’d often go into the specifics of everything and give people information overload because I was worried about missing something important. I got a lot of feedback around this and was regularly asked to “keep it high-level”. I really had to work at this, and I needed to get help from peers, mentors, managers and external research to understand what this meant, when it mattered and how to be effective at a higher level of detail. With years of practice, I am now much better at communicating and that’s helped me progress into a leadership position. This is just one example of me learning a skill which I thought was impossible. If I can do it, so can you!
Career path
Data Product Owner
First Central
From 09/2022 to 07/2023Data for Analytics Innovation Lead
First Central
From 07/2023 to 07/2023Product Owner
Nationwide Building Society
From 05/2021 to 09/2022Company
What do you like about your job and the company?
I work with Retail and Technical pricing most in my role as well as insight teams in areas like Claims and Fraud and Data Science. These teams try to solve difficult business problems to make sure we achieve the best results for our customers, whether that’s giving them a personalised and exceptional experience, calculating the perfect price of their insurance, protecting them from fraudsters or helping them navigate the often quite stressful time of making a claim. The best part of my job is working with these specialists to understand how we can look at the data differently to drive better outcomes. Is there data they haven’t considered? Could we create a dataset representing a new behaviour in our customers? Are there new techniques we can apply to old problems to get a different view? How can we outsmart fraudsters to guarantee our customers’ peace of mind? I love to help people, be creative and solve problems so this is my dream job where I get to do all three at once!
Greatest achievements
In 2022 I was nominated by my colleagues in three separate categories of the industry-wide Women in Tech Excellence Awards. I was so humbled by the nominations and kind words written by my colleagues who ranged from people who worked in my team through to senior leaders within the organisation. Being nominated was an achievement in itself and I was then even more surprised to hear that I’d made the shortlist for Hero of the Year alongside nine other incredibly talented women! I‘d always thought I was just doing my job, going about my day to day doing the best that I could. I had no idea I was even capable of inspiring others, let alone actually doing that today. It was a huge eye-opener moment for me, and I felt so proud to know I’d made such a difference to others. Since then, I’ve been more self-aware and actively look for opportunities to inspire young people in data, those starting out in their data journey and people who haven’t ever really thought about data as a career. I want others to know they can achieve anything if they put their mind to it!
Jacob H
Performance Analyst
Top Insider Advice
Ever since I started as a handler, I’ve constantly pushed for positive change, working with different business areas throughout my tenure and learning from each experience. When I think back to my application to become a Performance Analyst, I was lucky I could pull experiences from my time as a handler and team leader. However, they weren't all huge changes to processes or massive improvements to performance. Nothing is too small; as long as you’re tenacious, inquisitive and excited by continuous improvement, you're already halfway there!
Lauren C
Culture Lead
Top Insider Advice
I’m a natural introvert and I don’t think anyone in my personal life would describe me as outgoing or confident! But, I’ve found in my career so far that the occasions where I’ve been brave - whether that’s deciding to move away from HR (even though I studied a Masters in the topic!) or saying yes to presenting in front of a crowd of senior leaders - have been the times where I’ve grown and developed the most. I’m at a point in my career where I’m eager to grow and progress, so being brave is something I try to make a conscious effort to do. It can be scary to say yes to things you might usually shy away from but, by getting more practice and exposure to these things, over time they naturally begin to feel a bit easier. Even if things don’t always go to plan, it’s all part of the journey.
Adam W
Product Manager
Top Insider Advice
It sounds obvious, but sometimes it can be easy to perform the actions required for your role in a way that doesn’t best amplify your strengths. Be acutely aware of your own strengths and play to them, putting together a development plan for areas of improvement. I’d recommend developing your strengths too. Just because you’re naturally good at something doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels. Have a mindset of wanting to move from the top 10% to top 1%. Always welcome feedback too whether it’s positive or constructive. Don’t take constructive feedback negatively, to be imperfect is to be human. We all have areas we can improve on.