Data analyst placement Review

The team I worked with were all welcoming and supportive which was a bonus and to start with I was encouraged to learn new skills on elevate which made me feel valued and encouraged me to improve my own abilities in areas I otherwise might not have done. However sometimes it feels like resource is quite tight across the team and this was especially brought to light with Covid Causing increased workload and added stress

There is not a bad thing I could say about my colleagues all very supportive and inclusive with many social events taking place for all throughout the year. Very understanding also with any concerns or issues. Also the added touch of nominations for spot awards really shows how much they value the work you have done extra and makes it fell like it was worthwhile. In terms of feeling valued by anyone high up the business doesn’t really give that impression to me and morale for others can be low

Support was great at the start of the placement year and whenever I needed it I was not afraid to ask for it. Further down the line it felt like such support was still available but harder to receive due to strained resource(partly down to Covid though) I was often pushed to work outside my comfort zone but was happy with that as I wasn’t presumed to know everything and therefore when I needed the support it was often there.

This one is a very hard question to answer. Deadlines often came around the same time each month for each client so some weeks were much busier than others. To add to this an unpredictable amount of client requested project work was also to be done on the side. For the first and last week of the month I could be very quiet if there was minimal project work on the side but with multiple projects I would quickly find myself as busy as a busy week with minimal projects. I would say when Covid calms down as already seems to be the case more time will become available to focus on process improvements as there is always something to be improved.

I was running all processes and producing client facing reports as well as carrying out quality assurance for client data. Towards the end I also picked up client queries as I became more familiar with most aspects of the data we were looking at. If anything flagged as unordinary in the data it was my responsibility to find out why and to make sure I kept my line manager/supervisor in the loop as all my work was second checked as standard procedure.

On my degree I shall be doing a data mining module which presumably will include many of the skills I used whilst on placement. It will likely include using softwares like office and SAS/wps coding. Also in general there are many lines and methods of communication I used through out placement which should be very useful in future office roles. In particular I have experienced communicating with my replacement placement student who was in fact death and I have also worked with offshore teams who do not have English as their first language.