Q-Khu Plot – my experience as a Quantium grad (1)

Posted on: July 3, 2023

Post Category: Data

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Earlier this year I started my graduate data analyst role at Quantium, and I got some great exposure. Because of this, I’d thought I’d provide a close-to-unfiltered view of my experience, in this series called Q-Khu Plot, and I hope this will be helpful for anyone who is considering joining the company as an intern/graduate.

Q-Khu Plot is my short blot post series, where I reflect on my experience at Quantium, and the plan is that I share my reviews and insights on a biannual basis. So there will be another Q-Khu plot post near the end of the year.

This instalment of Q-Khu Plot will be covering the following:

• A summary of my graduate program experience so far – and with Quantium more broadly
• My experience and how it compared to my expectations
• Some of the personal challenges I’m having, moving away from student life and towards working life

My experience so far

To keep it short (and sweet), my experience has been great:

• I’ve been learning a lot and I got to get involved in pretty impactful work/projects.
• People have been great, respectful and supportive, and
• Social aspect has been good, especially within my own team.

My first one-year rotation is in the Financial Planning and Analysis team, and so far I’ve kinda been assuming the role of a data specialist within the broader Finance team.

Alteryx and Power BI have been the main tools I’ve been using to date, and it’s been great being able to create some valuable things for the team and the broader business – creating workflows to support our data pipeline, building out dashboards for some financial data use cases like sales and invoicing, etc.

How the experience compared to my expectations

Here were some of my expectations of the company before joining:

1. Good work-life balance
2. Good social aspect and bonding among the graduates

So how did these compare to what I’ve learnt?

Regarding work-life balance, it depends. For more internal facing teams, like Quantium’s own finance team, and teams involved in Quantium’s partnership with Woolworths (i.e. WiQ), you will more likely come across the standard working hours (9am-5pm). For more external facing teams, like those in the Consumer/FMCG and Health and Government verticals, working hours are more variable and can get long – it’s very project dependent.

Regarding the social aspect, there have been ample opportunities for me to socialise with my teammates – and a couple with the other graduates within my cohort. Within the finance team, there is a social committee that organises team events every once a while, and thus far we had a few team lunches and there was one time where we got to leave the office at 3pm and went for bowling for a couple hours. There’s also a social lunchtime basketball group, where Quantium people from different parts of the business play in a social competition.

I *did*, however, expect the People and Culture team, specifically those who handle the graduate academy, to have a hand in organising social events for the graduates. As it stands, I think the current graduate cohort would benefit from organised social events, given that most graduates kinda stay within their own teams/verticals and only get to socialise over catchups and during lunch. Otherwise, a few of the current graduates decided to set up a round of random 1-on-1 catchups every week, and a large majority of the graduates decided to get involved in that, which was nice.

Personal challenges

So far, I’ve managed my transition from Uni to full-time work pretty well. Full-time work did sound hectic at first, but I’ve been pretty fortunate to be part of a company that strongly encourages their team members to catch up and work flexibly; I’ve been able to meet people and take frequent short breaks from my work without feeling guilty about it, and that has been a big help.

One thing I *am* working on is staying productive on my work-from-home days, and I’m currently experimenting with long video calls with old Uni mates who are also currently working full-time – “study-with-me video” kind of vibe.

There have been a few days where I’d start early and finish early, and some days where I’d start late and finish late, but that was by choice i.e., whenever I was “feeling it” haha. Having more consistent contact hours is a concern for another time; at the moment, I’m just cool with getting stuff done.

Also, what I’m going to share next is not so much a challenge I’m struggling with, but perhaps something that incoming graduates or current students should be aware of: data work is broad. There will be data analysis and there will be building machine learning models, and what not, but when you work, at least at a consultancy, you might have to get involved in other things, like quality assurance and data governance. What you learn from your data analytics and data science courses will probably only be a small portion of the data work required at this company, or in the industry more broadly, so be open minded with your experience.

But overall, Quantium has been great, and I do plan to stay in the company for at least 2 years.

Stay tuned for my second Q-Khu Plot post, coming later this year in December!

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My name is Jason Khu, and I write about data analytics/visualisation and professional development for young professionals.

Read more of this type of content by checking out my personal blog Data & Development Deep Dives and by following or connecting with me on LinkedIn.