I am currently a pricing analyst in the Private Bank and Wealth Management division at Barclays. This involves using data to generate portfolio insights and help inform pricing decisions. I work within the business and require knowledge of financial services, as well as data analytics and visualisation so it is a real mix of knowledge and skills.

I have a somewhat untraditional educational background for somebody working in technology, with a BSc in Geography and then pivoting to do a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. I then joined Barclays on the Aspiring Developer graduate scheme.

I originally started my career as a back-end developer. I realised that this was not the best fit for me and moved into a data analyst role as having a role where I could mix my technical and non-technical skills appealed to me. When starting out in technology, don’t be afraid to try different things – discovering a role that you don’t want to do is a valuable process as you can rule that out! Technology is a vast field with plenty of roles to explore which require different skills and technologies.

In my day-to-day role, I use Tableau for a lot of data analysis and visualisation. Before my role as a data analyst, I had never heard of Tableau before and had to learn from scratch! I started to learn the basics of Tableau and data visualisation principles with an on-demand Coursera course which was great to get familiar with the software. I find Tableau quite an accessible software to learn and quick to get started because it’s quite intuitive with its drag and drop interface. My skills really began to grow as I got stuck into projects, applied what I’ve learnt and find solutions for views or analysis that I wanted to create. Doing is definitely the best way of learning!

As with any learning process, there were some highs and lows! A high was seeing a project finish and people start to use the dashboard that I had created. It was a very tangible outcome for weeks of hard work and comparing the first version to the final version I could see how far my skills had come. Passing my Tableau certification which validated my competence and getting Viz of the Day and seeing my data visualisation on the Tableau homepage are also highs!

Sometimes in Tableau, things are not always straight forward. Things that seem that they should be easy to do aren’t. A lot of time has been spent trying to figure something out, creating workarounds or pivoting my original approach. As I mentioned above, Tableau is quick and easy to get started with. However, to really be good and learn to get the most out of Tableau, it can take time and experience. For example, level of detail and table calculations are harder to understand and master. In these situations, asking for help from peers, looking online and enhancing your skills can help. I did this in a number of ways as I’ll outline below.

Getting feedback from your peers, both technical and non-technical. For example, getting different perspectives from those who will use the dashboard or the analysis can help to refine and improve your work. A career in data isn’t just about the analysis you do, it’s how you communicate it to others to make an impact and drive business decisions.

Additionally, the Tableau community is fantastic with lots of resources on the internet which I would recommend checking out. The ones I found most useful are:

• Back 2 Viz Basics  – master the foundations of what makes a good chart and find ways to optimise them
• Workout Wednesday – discover new functionality and ways to build charts. This really expanded my knowledge of what the art of the possible is!
• Makeover Monday – flex your creativity by reimaging a dataset
• Tableau Public – a repository of data visualisations. I always use this for inspiration and learning new methods.If you see a viz you like, download it, take it apart and see how it was made
• Lots of creators such as Andy Kriebel, The Flerlage Twins and Tableau Tim to name a few. Many creators will have blogs, YouTube and LinkedIn posts with tutorials, inspiration, new features etc.
• Tableau User Groups are great ways to meet people across different industries and network