From London Dreams to Data Schemes — serendipity in job hunting
If you’re a graduate searching for a job, a professional considering a career change, or simply someone interested in personal & professional development, this post might be of interest to you. After realising that my post-graduation dreams of a London corporate life were not going to work out, I had to reconsider my plan. Making a somewhat hasty decision to get into Business Development in a start-up, I quickly realized I had begun down one of those paths you don’t go back on. Join me on a nostalgic look back at how my random start in Sales led me to pursue a career in Data.
Initially, leaving uni with a BSc in Economics and Spanish, I’d hoped to move immediately to London and jump into the glamour of a Corporate Finance Grad Scheme at a top London bank. Turns out, despite my perseverance, every single recruiter in London knew that that was not my path. Perhaps they could see it in the single forgotten crease in my white blouse, in the not-even-close-to-perfect scores of my online numerical reasoning tests, or in the way my eyes sparkled when I inevitably asked the question ‘Is there an opportunity to move abroad with this role?’. I got nothing close to a sniff of a London corporate job offer and decided, with pouted lips, that I didn’t even want to move to London anyway nor work for a bank. I packed up my bags, and like Dumbo, said farewell to the (grad scheme) circus.
In the years that followed, my ‘career path’ was largely determined by what job I could get in the city I wanted to live in, which allowed me the lifestyle I wanted to live. That being said, the jobs that I had back then did have some sort of theme, start-ups being the first theme and Sales-ish roles being the second.
The start-up thing came somewhat organically whilst I was still stewing in the cloud of rejection from every London banking institution you can put a name to. As any broken-hearted person knows, the best way to get over something is to aim for its antithesis. I discovered that there were jobs where you didn’t have to wear businesswear, could call your manager ‘babe’ or ‘man’, and were surrounded by young, trendy people aka under 28s who love playing ping-pong in the office and have no qualms with partying with the C-Suite on Thursdays. Start-ups were going to be my perfect rebound.
The sales-ish thing was somewhat less reactively thought out. With basically no professional skills to my name I decided that a job in Biz Dev &/or Sales would teach me the basic skills for life & my early career — communication, persuasion, organisation, & prioritisation. Only when I was in there did I realise the whole stack of adjacent skills you learn whilst the phone is being slammed down in your headset multiple times a day, and you’re fighting for scraps of commission in a constantly turbulent organisation — self-motivation, persistence, active listening, problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and most importantly, resilience.
I spent a few years progressing from salesy roles to Account Management, and Key Account Management (with a brief diversion into Customer Support that was neither enjoyable for myself nor the customers I was supporting). Whilst milling around my daily duties I found myself to be particularly capable of avoiding the phone whenever one of my clients rang. Swerving difficult conversations where I was likely going to have to calm down an angry customer, I preferred to be knee-deep in Excel, collating bits of scattered data from our myriad of data sources. I built charts, tables, and data presentations, and at the apex of my (then) data skills, I built a client scoring matrix (essentially a data table) which I presented to my customers as a means of showing them where and how they could improve their KPIs. Fortunately for me, the Head of Sales noticed my daily diversions and suggested I make the move official, joining a new Sales Ops team he was setting up, as a Business Analyst. It was approximately the first time I’d heard of the role, and since it would mean I would spend 95% of my day in Excel and 0% of my day on the phone with clients, I accepted immediately. I didn’t know how to be a Business Analyst and remember precisely the moment my manager suggested I learn this thing called SQL, which would ‘make it really easy to get any bit of data alongside any other bit of data instead of having to download and manually join from a bunch of CSVs’. This was the single most amazing thing I’d heard, basically ever, and I was pumped to get stuck in.
At roughly the same time, my then-company hired a Head of Analytics, who took me under his wing as his mentee and suggested I join his data team. I felt very much like his sidekick, following him around to meetings and shadowing him as he Excel keyboard-shortcutted my tiny brain into oblivion. He and his team were unbelievably patient in those early days and gave me space and time to figure stuff out, as well as providing constant support when I was struggling. I owe that team massively, and definitely wouldn’t have persevered with data if it weren’t for them (♥️).
As a fledgling Business Analyst, I ploughed into Udemy, hoping to get some inspiration along with the well-needed hard skills. I flew through Advanced Excel, SQL beginner, intermediate, & advanced, PowerBI, Design Thinking, Marketing & Web Analytics, and Stats for Business Analysis. I also read up on The Pyramid Principle, A/B testing, effective visualisations, and storytelling for analytics. To get my head a bit more in the ‘data game’, I also studied the usual suspects on the data bookshelf — Lean Analytics, The Signal and the Noise, Weapons of Math Destruction, Freakonomics & Superfreakonomics, The Model Thinker, Everybody Lies, The Accidental Analyst etc.
With each job change since then, there was a movement towards something ‘more technical’ whilst still keeping one foot firmly planted in The Business. I went from Business Analyst, to Commercial Business Analyst, to CRM Data Analyst, and now Analytics Engineer. I guess it was a steep learning curve, to be honest, I just remember being driven to do stuff and read stuff and learn stuff because I found it interesting. In Data, there is always a technically better way of doing something and that is what I find so fun.
In my pursuit of whatever job I could get in the city I want to live in, I was fortunate to stumble upon something I really enjoyed. I was even more fortunate to have a few special leaders who encouraged those interests and pushed me towards them. It took what felt like a thousand grad scheme rejection emails and a few random ‘take what I could get’ jobs for me to find the thread of what I love doing at work. Slido is giving me the opportunity to really yank on that thread, and luckily, since I work fully remotely, I won’t have to give that up when I find a new dream city!
I suppose my conclusion would be to take those jobs and seize the opportunities you can get because you never know what could happen. If you keep feeling around for things that you enjoy, and use that interest (or maybe even passion!) to steer you, those random opportunities might just lead you serendipitously to something that you love.
