A story of Natalia Simonenko who made a transition from finance to data with the help of Practicum100 program.

On moving to Israel

My family moved to Israel two years ago, and we expected challenges associated with different cultures, languages, economies and business environments. Still, I was confident that I could build a successful career in Israel. My previous position was Finance Controller at a home appliances and electronics retail chain (420 stores in Russia). I was responsible for reporting and managing financial projects and also led a team of three people.

So by the time I found myself in Israel, I had already started an analytics career in finance. I have always liked to read figures and discover what is behind them. I understood that my analytical skills could make me a competitive candidate for Data Analyst positions but the new country and its business environment proved that Excel skills were not enough to work with Big Data. The Data Analyst program by Yandex Practicum turned to be the perfect fit for me.

On Practicum100 program

After the selection process I was accepted to the program. My main concern was about being able to study online 100%, to meet the deadlines (and what could happen if I fail to). I had the experience of distant learning at Warwick Business School, but we had in-class sessions each semester. Nevertheless, my successful completion of Yandex Practicum proved that the curriculum and the mentors’ work were efficient and competent even in distance mode.

I had no previous coding experience and the main challenge I faced during my studies was getting acquainted with functions and parameters. That said, the materials were tailored to the students’ needs and helped to understand difficult topics. My favourite part was visualization and Machine Learning. Python pandas libraries help you to create beautiful graphs and use ML algorithms for clusterization tasks. Besides that, at career accelerator part of the program, students learn job search skills which are super helpful.

On work

During my study at Yandex Practicum, I joined IVC Research Center, the owner and manager of a database that tracks investment flows in Israel’s technology sector. My responsibilities included ETL building for Sisense BI dashboards and creating reports. Unfortunately, IVC did not have a full time position for me. It was a perfect start of a Data Analyst career in Israel while I was still a student and I greatly appreciate my experience working for IVC and the people who believed in me. But after 10 months working there it was the right time to move on.

On new employment

In my experience, references played a very important role in job landing. Candidates recommended by an existing employee have a significant advantage. It is also important to keep your LinkedIn profile updated and active. A headhunter found my profile on LinkedIn and approached me offering a position in Exacius.

Exacius has created and successfully applies a scaling model for critical inflection points at growth stage companies. The model provides all-dimensional support in products, analytics and advertising engines. It is an international company, operating all over the world. Most of the team members work remotely, so on my first day at Exactius I worked from home. I joined the Slack channel, Monday dashboards, and received access to my team’s documents on Google Drive and Big Query. I received a welcome call from my boss, the BI lead. During the day, I had five conference calls with people from different divisions and started to familiarize myself with customers. It was a busy day, which was clearly the beginning of a long journey. Today I am lucky to be part of two teams: BI and Google campaign management. BI Analysts report on the results of campaigns, CRM activities and product improvements. My mission is, based on analysis, to help find opportunities to scale the clients’ business more efficiently and adopt the findings on the company level. I remain on a learning curve to master the Google Ads and the Google Analytics platforms. Furthermore, I have been getting hands-on experience with new tools like BigQuery and GoogleSheets. If I had to give an advice to those, who are still working for a job, I would say:

Find inspiration in shared projects, try to participate in professional events, meet people from the industry and never stop learning.

On being a Data Analyst

In my view, being a Data Analyst is not only about pulling data, preprocessing it and making beautiful graphs. The source of inspiration is to be curious, and the main skill is to ask the right questions looking at data sets such as which factors affected the result, and how we can change it or repeat the outcome, how we should track the results next time. This year, I made a commitment to do every day something that I have never done before. This habit helped me realize that when I am under pressure, I approach difficult tasks and meet challenges more effectively, meaning I learn and grow as a professional and as a person.