C A R E E R I DE AS
ANALYSING THE FUTURE "Always have a few technical skills up your sleeve"
MICHELLE KHUSU BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ANALYST
WHY THIS PROFESSION? Analytics gives me the opportunity to work with many departments and people within the business/ company, including the IT technical people. This then gives me the opportunity to network and also to get to know the ins and outs of the company. Analytics allows you to see how a company is doing, how it can get better, and where it is going wrong and even wasting money.
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WHAT TRAINING DID YOU DO, AND WHERE? I studied a BCom at the University of the Western Cape. Maths is essential for this type of career. SQL and Excel skills are also very important, and for those who havenʼt done much of that at school, there are plenty of cheap and free online courses. One that I recently did was Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence with Coursera. IS THERE A PERSONALITY BEST SUITED FOR WORKING IN ANALYTICS? Interpersonal skills are very useful to have because you work with a lot of different people from different backgrounds. Analytics provides a huge amount of stats and information to many
of the departments within the organisation. How you interact with people will have an effect on your desired results for your work.
DESCRIBE A TYPICAL DAY A typical day includes creating data analysis for different departments. For example: creating a dashboard for marketing that shows who our clients are in terms of age, how much they spend on our products and where they live. This would then help marketing in their strategies and plans for which specific client segments to target and when. WHAT IS THE MOST CHALLENGING PART OF YOUR JOB Trying to understand and meet everyoneʼs needs! We strive to get to a point where each department can have their own dashboard (automated report with all relevant stats) and access data without asking us or waiting on BI to get the data for them. All we would need to do is to
make sure that the data is always refreshed.
WHAT IS THE BEST PART? Job recognition and satisfaction. You get different challenges each day and you never know what request or project youʼre going to be working on. You also get exposed to many other fields such as finance and IT development. This gives you what is called domain knowledge, which means you know the ins and outs of the business. ADVICE FOR NEWCOMERS? Learn a programming language or learn SQL for database navigation – it makes life so much easier. Even if youʼre studying towards another career, always have a few technical skills up your sleeve because the workplace is never what you expect it to be and you never just do one thing. Having these skills, on top of your soft skills, will help you grasp the work more quickly, and you will also be a greater asset to any company.
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