Q-Khu Plot – my experience as a Quantium grad (2)

Posted on: February 29, 2024

Last Updated on: March 16th, 2024

Post Category: Professional Development

---

It’s already been a year since I started at Quantium. And boy, the experience was a lot.

Earlier this year I shared a post about my first few months, as a part 1 to my ‘Q-Khu plot’ series. And now I’m back with part 2.

Here are some of the things I’ll cover in this iteration of Q-Khu plot:

• Some of the cool pieces of work I got to do.
• The social aspect of my team, and the broader company (which I am grateful for being a part of).
• And some of the advice I’d give myself starting 1 year ago (and what I’d tell to some of the new data analyst graduates).

So… let’s get into it.

The work I got to do

The work I got to do this half of the rotation was more challenging, to say the least. Same interesting pieces of internal data, overseeing the operations of the company from a financial/operations perspective… but this time around, I built a lot more cool things I wouldn’t have imagined building myself in my own time, on a personal project.

I built some really serious stuff – both from an business impact perspective and a skills development perspective. I built an executable data-extraction program using Python. I built a dashboard hooked up to an application for users to make comments. And I built a GUI automation that saved a team member 10+ hours a month.

But one of the main challenges I’ve experienced while working in the team is the stakeholder management – not that I hate talking to people… but sometimes I would deliver something that would be valuable in theory but not when it actually went into the hands of the user.

Because the difficulty with working in Finance is that people need data to be as up-to-date as possible. But sometimes things just break (and there have been a couple times where our internal analytics pipeline didn’t execute for at least a day).

And then people will start to question you about it. People raise concerns or even stop using the reports you built because they aren’t up to date, or a few values doesn’t align with expectation. Then they go back to how they’ve always done it (*manually*), and it gets a bit frustrating in that regard.

That was a challenge I didn’t really expect since starting, and it would be interesting to see how that could be improved – whether that be through embedding new technologies or even processes going forward.

But it’s interesting to see what Finance people are looking for when it comes to working with their data. Nonetheless, a good learning experience.

Anyways, social aspect…

The social aspect was really good within my team, to say the least. We had a couple team lunches, couple birthday celebrations in the kitchen, secret santa, a potluck in the park, and a pretty memorable farewell dinner we had for one of our colleagues.

And during late-October, we had Quantium day. People went to Hunter Valley, and there was this big business update meeting, followed by some team-bonding activities and a dress-up party. I heard a few complaints about the activities and the food, but honestly given that we pretty much had that experience fully paid for… I could not complain; I thought it was fun.

Like LOOK at me!

Then on the Friday before shutdown period, there was a Luna Park event for people company-wide. I didn’t go to it, but it was there…

As of writing, it’s currently the 29th of Feb. And next week, I’ll have my farewell dinner with some people from the Group Services team (who can make it to dinner on a Wednesday night).

Where am I going? I’m moving to another division/team within the business (I’ll talk more about this later in the post).

Overall, I had a lot of fun – and people within the team have been super nice (generally).

A few key learnings from my experience, and what I’d recommend to myself back then – and the current graduate analysts

Earlier this year, during mid-Feb, we got more graduates joining us at the company.

And I had the pleasure of chatting with some of them – through a few informal catchups.

Few of them asked me for a bit of advice for the graduate program, and it got me thinking about what I could have done differently with my approach/experience.

The most common piece of advice I gave was to learn as much as you can, and ask questions (even if you think others expect you to already know the stuff). And this is something I still stand by. 

But on reflection, I’d also add: be clear about what you want to develop (and be candid) with your People Leader – because they’re responsibility *is* to support you with that growth.

Building that relationship with your People Leader, where you can be candid and open about your experience and goals, will help you grow.

Graduates would often get stuck into just ticking off items in a checklist with their People Leaders. But I think it would be nice for the grads to also think about how they can leverage that relationship to make progress on *their* own professional goals.

This is something I could have benefited from, even though it does go a bit beyond the requirements of what graduates need to do.

What’s next for me…

For my next vertical, I’ll be moving to Health. Not too sure how that’s going to go, but I’m keeping an open mind.

During my last week in the Finance team, conveniently, I received feedback from my People Leader, and I’ll be seeking for more opportunities for me to grow in one specific area he thought I could improve on (which is my confidence).

I have very loose ideas of how I’m going to do that within my new team (with my new People Leader), but… I’ll talk all about it in my next post.

But at the very least, it’s time for me lose that mindset of ‘I’m just a graduate data analyst’ and that I’m expected to behave/work a certain way by my colleagues and People Leader(s).

I’m pretty fortunate to have worked at a company like Quantium, where the results/impact I deliver has a lot more weight than how I do it.

And what I hope to accept/internalise in the coming year(s) is that I’m the only person who is hypercritical of myself; 95% of the time, I’m thinking about myself, my growth and what I could improve on, and everyone else is thinking about theirs.

So it’s about that time to stop thinking like I’m a fraud or an imposter – waiting to get called out (or get fired, yikes).

_____

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.

Also, I just realised that I said I was going to put this out December (last year). But doing it just before I move into my next team sounds a bit more right…