My job is all about using data to answer business questions and improve how businesses operate and how they appeal to their customers. Quantium as a company uses data in this way across a variety of industries like banking, telco and government; I specifically work in the grocery industry and have previously worked with clients in the wider retail industry as well. In my role, I use Woolworths data to help some of the biggest food suppliers in the country. We answer questions like “What product should I launch in Woolworths?”, “What price should this product be?”, “What customers are buying my product?” To answer these questions, I use big data to find trends and insights about the supermarket and its customers. This data includes millions and millions of rows and a lot of my day is spent coding in SQL or Python, then manipulating data in spreadsheets to turn those millions of rows into something meaningful and interpretable. The rest of my day involves meetings, emails and presentations where I communicate complex ideas to internal and external stakeholders. This is the most crucial part of my job, being able to show the value of this data and help clients makes decisions and actions off the back of our analysis. I also help manage an amazing team of analysts, supporting and challenging them whilst making sure everyone meets their deadlines!
I grew up in Brisbane, went to school and university there and started my job at Quantium in our Brisbane office. Throughout school and university, I loved all the subjects I studied, I thrived on variety and switched my mind between maths/science and English / humanities. When I finished school, I decided I wanted to keep that variety and started a dual degree in Science and Journalism, thinking maybe I could become a science journalist. At first, I majored in physics because that was my favourite subject at school; however, in my first year, I took a statistics course and absolutely loved it! This was the first time I’d seen maths and data being used to analyse, understand, and change the real world. I continued with my dual degree and in my third year, after several applications to various companies, I landed an internship with Quantium. I worked on a project in our insurance team for a couple of months and loved the work and the team. The internship taught me there were jobs out there where I could use big data, maths, and stats to answer real-world questions and communicate these complex subjects to other people. Following the internship, I accepted a grad role with Quantium in Brisbane where I worked for about 2 years before transferring to the Melbourne office – I’ve been working here (and loving my work) ever since.
There’s a range of people and backgrounds that could do my job or the job of others in my team. A background in STEM and a love of numbers and logic is a must but you don’t necessarily need to know coding or modelling or anything really high tech, there are always opportunities to learn that if you want to. You don’t need a journalism degree to be a data analyst, but I actually think my journalism and communications studies help me daily in my current job – effective communication can be really underrated in STEM but it’s so important when translating big data into real-world actions.
The coolest thing about my job is when I see the real world change because of the projects I’ve worked on and the insights I and my team have given to clients. When I walk into Woolworths and see a new product or a different shelf layout and I know I was involved in making that decision, I know that (seemingly) little change can impact millions of people around the country and that’s pretty cool. The other amazing thing about my job is getting to work with a bunch of smart, fun and supportive teammates every day – Quantium has such an outstanding culture that I never take for granted!
A limitation of my role is that we’re bound by our clients’ priorities, ways of working and budgets. There are some amazing things we can do with big data but our projects are dictated by our clients and they might not be interested or they might not want to invest, so we don’t get to do some of that cool stuff. Likewise, I’ve been to a lot of presentations where we make recommendations that never come to fruition for one reason or another. I often don’t get closure on whether the analysis I work on was worth it or if it was helpful when applied to the real world.