Learn more about Naledi's experience, from the time she applied to The Data School, to her career as a Data Analytics and Visualisation Consultant. Naledi was part of Cohort 3 of The Data School London, which took place from May 2016 to March 2018.
Interviewed by Mel Niere | Edited by Vivian Ng
Before The Data School
Q: What brought you to The Data School? What factors influenced your decision to apply and ultimately join The Data School?
A: I found out about The Data School through my employer at the time. I was on a fixed-term contract with Leicestershire County Council, on their consultations team, and had started using Tableau there. While I’d moved to Leicester for six months for the job, I decided that I didn't want to stay in Leicester and wanted to go back to London.
One of my team leads Rob Radburn, who was a Tableau Visionary, had heard about The Data School from his friend, Chris Love, who still works for The Information Lab today. He said to me, “If you enjoy this data visualization stuff, why don't you apply?” His encouragement was a major factor in my decision to apply because I had some doubts about whether this was really something that I could do within the charity sector (non-profit industry) and whether this was going to be relevant for my next steps.
When I started this job at Leicester County Council, I wasn’t good in Excel, and I had to learn the survey tool they used (SNAP). I felt like I wasn't an expert in anything practical, so I wanted to change that. I had been looking for schemes (apprenticeships) and initially thought, maybe I can join an Excel boot camp or something like that because that would be useful. But then I fell in love with Tableau and thought: How amazing would it be if I could just do this all day?
During The Data School
Q: What was your training experience like?
A: I really loved the four months of training with other people. It felt like such a privilege to be paid to learn all day long, in a fun and supportive, but also competitive environment. I think that everybody was able to learn in the way that they wanted to. Half the group was quite competitive, while half the group didn't really care, and the people who were competitive loved to make little games out of who could be the fastest in doing an exercise. However, we still worked together on everything, including our client projects, with support from our coaches. Andy Kriebel (Tableau Hall of Famer) taught us primarily, though we'd also have some guest speakers occasionally.
The client projects were at a difficulty level where we didn't just sail through them. We had conflicts and challenges that we learned from those projects. I remember all the clients were happy with what we produced at the end. I think it was pitched up to the exact grade level with exactly the right level of support that we got throughout. The weekly presentations were valuable, as the fact that we had to present every single Friday makes you a lot more comfortable with talking in front of a group of people until this become second nature—especially because presenting a dashboard is a specific skill, separate from other forms of presenting.
Another useful experience, we had a “short-notice project.” I was at the Data School when Brexit happened; half of us were European citizens in the UK through the EU freedom of movement right, so this impacted us quite directly. We had been working on a project all week long, I don't remember what it was. We all came in on the Friday morning, all quite deflated and surprised by the result, so Andy decided to change our project for the week. Everybody was tasked to do a visualization on Brexit instead and to present it by the afternoon, so super quick turnaround of finding data on this thing that had just happened. As a group, we had to decide how we would distribute this project and present it in just a few hours. That's something you must do on the job sometimes, and you must let go of some aspects of your perfectionism and find the balance between what's possible and how close you can get without destroying yourself in the process.
There's so much encouragement to ask others in the organization for help and feedback. And if you want to learn something new, if you have an interesting problem, people will help you and guide you in the right direction. It felt like two years of a learning environment, this was great.
Q: What was your experience during placement?
A: Placements gave me insight into lots of new areas of work. I learned a lot about the type of work, teams, and organizations that I would like to work in. I learned a lot even from the difficult experiences, especially as a woman in the industry, like a few encounters where it felt like I was coming into an environment where an assumption that I didn't know what to do was already being made. Or they would assume that all I do as a data visualization specialist is make charts or make data pretty, without really recognizing the skills that go into that or the value this has for the organization. But that doesn’t compare to all the people and teams who did recognize my skills and feeling like the expert that I wanted to be and being taken seriously.
All of those experiences were important because you build up resilience in an environment while still having a lot of support. If I was having a bad time in a placement, I could go back to The Information Lab, and they would advise me on what to do, or in the worst-case scenario, take me out of that placement. It's that sort of security that you have being in an environment like The Information Lab that you don't get if you enter into the working world on your own.
Finally, I learned lots of different practical skills while I was in the placements, like learning different tools or doing some database things. You get exposed to so many things that you can take into your next position.
After The Data School
Q: How did The Data School and The Information Lab serve as a launching pad for your data analytics career? Can you tell us more about your role now?
A: The Data School started as that launching pad and helped me direct my career. I had been at Deloitte together with another Data Schooler, Niccolò Cirone. He was volunteering for a small charity called Operation Fistula, but was offered a full-time job somewhere else. He couldn't do the volunteering anymore, and he had built up the analytics capacity to the point where they needed somebody full-time. I had worked with him at Deloitte, and we had chatted about what we wanted to do with our futures, so he knew that I was interested in this kind of work. He gave me a recommendation, so I interviewed with the CEO, and he hired me pretty much immediately. The CEO felt like it was a good fit, based on my education and interests, but I know that Nicco's recommendation also weighed heavily. He trusted Nicco and even said, “If Nicco thinks that you're good, then you're good.” I was lucky to have that connection.
After I left Operation Fistula, I did freelance work. During my placement time at Exosol, Eva Murray had introduced me to Gayan Peiris, who works at The United Nations Development Program (UNDP). As I was launching myself as a freelancer, Benedetta (Head of D&I at The Information Lab) reintroduced me to Gayan who was in the Tableau world and had these connections. A few months later, there was a position opening at UNDP, and Gayan wrote to me, “Hey, do you want to apply for this?” That’s how I connected with UNDP. I worked for UNDP for one and a half years. Because of the UN structure, my position moved from a hands-on to more of a strategic role, and that’s not where my passion is. In the end, we decided that the best way to meet both the needs of the team and my own was for me to become a contractor for the team, so I could focus on the hands-on data visualisation building again. I left my full-time position with them, but continued the work with UNDP in a slightly different modality, and still work with Gayanand the Chief Digital Office at UNDP now.
Through my work at UNDP, I met Cecila Cannon, who founded a Policy Research Center in Geneva (PoliSync Centre for International Policy Engagement). We work together with international organizations in the international policy space; I cover the data visualization and data part of that. The project I'm working on right now is for the World Meteorological Organization, and she made that connection. I did a two-day data visualization training for them, and now I'm building visualizations. My work currently consists of ongoing engagements like the one with PoliSync and UNDP with various organizations and smaller one-off projects like the one for WMO. Luckily so far, everything has been in the charity space. Once you put it out there that you're interested in this type of work, and you start doing projects in the charity space, people look at my profile online, and they see that this is what I'm interested in, and that I have experience in the same area. That’s how freelance offers come in, and that's been good.
Advice About The Data School
Q: What advice would you give to individuals considering applying to The Data School?
A: Figure out if data visualization is something that you're passionate about, if this is something that you're really interested in. The application for the Data School is a good exercise because it shows you what this job is like. If you download Tableau, start learning on your own, really enjoy that process, then you're probably going to enjoy The Data School.