Where It All Began

To understand why I do the things I do, you need to know my full story. How did someone with a background in Finance ended up in Data Analytics instead. Here's my story.

The Education

Unlike most people who started with degrees in Data Science or Software Engineering, I started from Finance & Accounting instead.

My education was a lot on business analytics rather than the data side of things. Unbeknownst to many, the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (ACCA) course does dig into Data Science/ Analytics topics.

At the time I was studying, this was under papers P4 Advanced Financial Management and P5 Advanced Performance Management. These papers covered financial data and non-financial data respectively.

But now ACCA, along with other accounting certifications, explicitly includes Data Science exam papers. This shows how important analytics is in the daily life of an accountant now.

First dive into Big Data

I started my career as an auditor in the Big Four firms. little did I expect I was going straight into the Oil & Gas industry.

And the thing with this industry is that all of the competing companies are huge. The thing that comes with it is an endless number of transactions, there's a big amount of data that needs to be churned.

When you work in Big Four and handling the largest clients in the world is that you have two separate teams to do the required work. Financial Auditors to handle analysis of information, and the IT side to get the data from all sorts of databases and transform it into information that could be understood.

Here's the problem I had at the time:

• having two different teams meant that the process to get from Team A and Team B was gonna take time.
• There's also the bureaucracy you had to go through to as both teams answer to different bosses.

Then the idea came to me. A solution that looked so simple but yet so hard to execute. I needed to learn both sides of the job. This way, I would no longer be dependent on any other teams. But the challenge was that I needed to learn not just a new skill but a whole new field of study!

And so this was when I started using more than just Excel for my analytics work. At the time, I was using TIBCO Spotfire (a competitor against Tableau, Power BI wasn't that famous at the time yet)

With Excel's limitation to 1,000,000 rows at the time, it felt like I unlocked a new superpower. I could analyze ANY size of data now.

Innovation, Innovation, Innovation

After 5 years in financial audit, it felt like it was time to move to a different role. Went into the Banking Industry in internal audit. Now I deal with more non-financial data, but still always focused on internal controls.

I was still doing the normal audit work expected of the job. But now I have a chance to help innovate the department itself as the Bank was going through a digital transformation.

I held a bigger role in the database administration of our content management system. I've been focused now more than ever on increasing the efficiency of the department's workflow.

Now I had time to create my own projects to automate all the things that could be automated.

Continuous Learning

Recently, a lot of changes happened rapidly. Microsoft started to market the new Microsoft Fabric software as part of its Power BI tools. And Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs keeps happening which seemed like once every other month. There is so much still to learn.

The problem was that there were not much more classes or certificates that I could take at this point in time. These innovative breakthroughs are coming at a rapid pace. There's something new each month!

In these emerging markets, there are now so few Subject Matter Experts that has time to teach others. The best people out there are the ones still developing these new technologies.

It came as a realization to me that the best way for me to learn is to network and communicate with those in the field. And what better way is there than to document my journey of automating everything in public?

So here I am, ready to share everything I know with everyone in my shoes. Look forward to my content in the future here!