Career Development: Saying Yes to Opportunities
Hi, I’m Chris Willcock and I am a Senior Data Engineer in a Product Pricing Team in Commercial and Performance. My career with EDF began by joining the Data and Tech grad scheme. This enabled me to gain experience in a range of roles, from visualising and engineering data, to being both a frontend and backend software engineer on different projects. It also provided me with a wide range of industry knowledge and soft skills that I leverage every day!
To begin with I worked in a Digital Analytics team, learning how to query data, and visualise it. It was also here that I was introduced to Google Analytics and Google Cloud Platform. I spent a large amount of time here building a Help Centre dashboard to provide insights from our website data. I then moved to a team called OpenIT, where I was introduced to backend software engineering, working on solutions for TPIs (third party intermediaries) to aid them in brokering energy. I then spent my last year in WMS (Wholesale Market Services) working in the Cost Stack team to manage and model NECs (Non-energy costs) and build tools to allow for more efficient modelling. Finally, I worked with WMS’s software engineering tool, learning frontend software engineering, and adding updates and interconnector features to their NIV tool (net imbalance volume).
Career development is very important to me personally. We spend a lot of our time working so being able to progress and develop new skills in the elements you are interested in keeps your day feeling new and exciting. For me it’s about embracing the overwhelming feeling of learning something new, in the hope that after some time you can look back and confidently say you understand something now. Consistently pushing yourself toward new ideas and projects allows you to maintain drive and not feel stagnant. For me once I had been through this loop a few times I started to realise that I was growing professionally. I was able to utilise experience and knowledge to help enhance other skills and to break goals down that I once thought were impossible into steps that I felt comfortable tackling. I always try to take time to reflect on the past, and appreciate everything that I have learnt and completed, not everything will be a success, but it will be a step that you can learn from.
I became interested in data during my Maths degree. The ability to put meaning to unrelated pieces of information captivated me immediately. It was also here that I was introduced to programming, making use of languages such as R to derive results. Both aspects really clicked with me and is the entire reason that I decided to pursue a career in Data and Technology. In the early stages of my career, I tried to say “yes” to as much as possible. Sometimes this wasn’t such a good idea and required me to spend a lot of my time learning new concepts, but it provided me with a great amount of exposure to how Data and Tech is being used to power as many business decisions as possible. I tried to always keep an open mind and remain inquisitive which has helped me to celebrate different viewpoints and methods rather than refuting them due to being something that I didn’t understand.
Once of the first “yes” moments I had was taking up the opportunity to provide my team with additional data by learning SQL. I had no experience of querying data up to that point, but I could see the benefit from learning, and over the next week and some long evenings, I was able to write some basic queries and deliver value to the team. I realised quickly that exploring new ideas and putting yourself forward to test them allowed you to learn more and more. I had a very similar experience with learning Python but before long I was utilising it day to day. For me I found that saying yes to these opportunities in a career sense helped to overcome the fear of starting something new. It’s always difficult for me to take the first step but I found that for me having some accountability made that step much easier. It was better for me to try, and fail, and learn, than it was to not try at all.
I tend to become burnt out when I have too much on my plate, this then affects my work life balance since I feel I need to work longer to compensate lack of delivery. It’s very easy to become overwhelmed with many tasks, so I found stepping back and taking some time to organise myself a massive help in mitigating this. Even though it feels as though you’re wasting time, breaking tasks down and prioritising them helps to get me back on track and up to date with everything. Some of the most satisfying days I’ve had are from completing a list of admin tasks that I’ve let build up over some time. Burnout is natural for me; I think it happens to everyone at some point and there are days where you just don’t want to work on a task or have had enough of it. I find taking some extra time to look after yourself, get outside, and do something entirely different to what you’re used to a good solution. Rearranging your surroundings, listening to a different genre of music, or taking a new route home can provide a reset to yourself which can drastically improve how you’re feeling.
Imposter syndrome is something that everyone suffers with although I think it’s more prevalent in Data and Tech due to how daunting some concepts initially seem. I have suffered from this, and it can be difficult to pull yourself out of. For me, being honest with people really helped. Admitting that I was struggling with something or didn’t feel that I could do something always turned out to be the first step in overcoming imposter syndrome. I find it very hard to say that I don’t understand, but I now know it’s the quickest route to being able to understand. Secondly, I would say time is a huge factor in overcoming imposter syndrome. As my knowledge and experience started to compound over time, I have been able to approach new tasks with an attitude of “I have done it before, so I can do it again”.
Staying up to date and relevant with new skills and technologies can be hard especially when everything moves so fast these days. I have found that taking time each week to pursue a new interest in Data and Tech helps me to do this. For example, when chatGPT was first released I put aside some time to get to grips with it and see what the tool could do. I found that I could use it convert functions into different languages, so if I came across a useful function in one language, I could convert it and after testing, it would be good to go. A lot of the time you may realise that it won’t be much help to your current role, but at least you now have some ideas of the capabilities of the tool or technology that you may later find a use for.
Saying “yes” to every opportunity in my early career helped me to grow quickly and gain valuable skills. However, it did create some gaps in my knowledge and at times meant I had to go back to basics to cover something that I would’ve learned had I not been purposefully learning something just to fulfil a task. I feel it’s very important to make sure you have a good foundation of knowledge when learning something new or approaching a new opportunity, a gap here can cost you much more time later down the road. It’s also important not to overload yourself with new ideas. Take your time and learn at your own pace, and only take on new opportunities if you feel ready for it!
For anyone starting a career in Data and Technology I would advise that you have an open mindset and be willing to learn. Don’t be afraid to ask a question or say you don’t understand something! Most importantly, have fun with it, Data and Tech has something for everyone so explore as much as you can and delve into anything and everything that interests you!
