Meandering journey from Data Scientist to Analytics & Innovation Lead
I’ve always been very good with numbers and chose to study Mathematics at university without really knowing what jobs were available to me. I struggled with the more conceptual maths topics of my degree and ended up taking a course in Big Data. This ignited my passion for data science! I started my career as a graduate data analyst, progressed to being an associate data scientist and spent lots of time building predictive models. I then stepped out of my comfort zone, away from a technical role and became a Relationship Manager. I led a team of six in a company-wide innovation competition and won by delivering a near real-time, personalised ‘know your customer’ dashboard for our frontline colleagues to drive better outcomes. This opened an opportunity to become a product owner and drive delivery of more advanced capability in the Customer Relationship Management space. After delivering several phases of work in this product, I decided to challenge myself again by moving to First Central in a Data Product Owner role. This was my first foray into insurance and managing a whole area rather than a single product. How much I loved building new relationships surprised me and I received fantastic feedback! After eight months, there was an opportunity to apply for a new Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning capability lead role. My application was successful, and I now lead the Data for Analytics Innovation capability, empowering colleagues in the business to unlock more value from our data through AI, ML and Advanced Analytics!
I lead the new Analytics & ML capability, driving more value from data
I‘m responsible for setting up a new capability within First Central which empowers colleagues within the business to perform advanced analytics, machine learning modelling and AI development. This means providing high quality granular data for analysis and experimentation, creating environments to train and fine tune models, making it possible to deploy models and integrate them into our customer journeys and to automate monitoring of our solutions to ensure continued high performance. I also provide standards of best practice and frameworks for developing models to ensure consistency across the organisation. Finally, I drive innovation within the entire organisations by running hackathons, innovation competitions, research and development opportunities and lunch-and-learn sessions to get people thinking differently.
Thinking up innovative solutions to complex problems
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!
You might not be a pro today, but you can learn!
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!
Shortlisted as Hero of the Year at the Women in Tech Excellence Awards
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!
