Hometown and province: Motherwell, Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape
Degree(s):
Current Job: Graduate Trainee, Standard Bank Group (SBG)
Previous Job(s): While I was a student at Rhodes University:
What motivated you to study further?
I saw myself working in the banking sector, therefore I noted that the Graduate Programs within this sector required at least honors degrees from candidates hence I decided to further my studies before joining SBG. Further, it is a step closer to getting my PHD.
How did you obtain your current position?
I applied for Quants Graduate Program at SBG by sending Greg an email with my CV & Transcript. I passed the first telephonic interview and went for psychometric test. Unfortunately, they never got back to me after that. I then sent Greg an email to find out about the status of my application and mentioned in the email that I am more than willing to attend final rounds of interview for any Graduate Program that he found me most suited for based on my assessments. Fortunately he gave me a chance to attend the final round of the Group Shared Services and Group Real Estate Shared Services Grad Program and the rest is History!
What is your area of specialization?
The Grad program is 18 months and we are required to rotate in 3 different business units within G2. I just finished my first rotation which was in Credit Rehabilitation & Recoveries (CRR). Basically CRR deals with customer collections across all the different products within the bank (Home Loans, Personal Loans, Card, VAF etc.). Team Leaders, Managers and Heads within these spaces require reports that determine Agent & Product performance using different measures. I am part of the Management Information Systems (MIS) team which assist CRR in producing these fully sustainable reports that are sitting on either QlickView, PowerBI and/or Excel (Pivot tables). So In my first rotation, I was an Analyst. However, in my remaining rotations I will be in different spaces such app development, extensive process mapping, Robotics and predictive modeling to name a few.
What course do you find was the most useful in your undergraduate/honours?
At this stage I would say Advanced Multivariate Statistics, Data Bases & System Analysis (from Information Systems) really helped me a lot in my first rotation. However, more of what I have studied might be required in my remaining rotations.
In what way does your qualification relate to your work?
Using raw data to produce useful insights for the business is my everyday job. The only thing different is the level at which we produce these insights depending on the audience and the business requirements. Therefore, my qualification & my first rotation’s role are the same WhatsApp group!!!
What are the best and most challenging parts of your job?
When I joined the MIS team I was tasked to build two dashboards namely, Post Call Survey and Rate My Service Dashboards. The PCS is a survey taken by CRR customers that communicate with our agents using telephonic channel whereas the RMS is a survey taken by our customers that communicate with our agents using email as a channel. Therefore, the challenge I faced was actually building these dashboards using Pivot on Excel as I had no experience in using this functionality in excel. Thanks to YouTube! I managed to find my way around this functionality. I was also tasked with doing analysis such as finding out if there is any association between our officer’s ratings from PCS, the amount of money they collect from our customers and quality assurance scores of these officers. The data that I needed to perform this kind of analysis was a challenge as the structure of the data was not uniform across all the tables that I was using. Another interesting analysis that I was tasked to perform was doing a comparison between officers which are in the learnership program and the permanent officers in terms of which one collect more money from our customer and tracking consistency of the officers in learnership once they become permanent. Therefore, I would say every day is a new day and it comes with its own challenges but at the end of the day it is part of growing as an individual.
Any advice to students:
Analytics is an on demand skill everywhere especially in the banking sector! I would like to encourage students to continue working hard. I know, statistics can be challenging at sometimes however, the rewards surpass that! I am looking forward to seeing all of you on the other side of the world! Cheers!
Last Modified: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 12:21:24 SAST