At Hastings, we value the expertise of all our professionals, yet we recognise we need to do our part to help bring more gender balance to the data and tech industry. We're committed to celebrating and supporting women in these areas, building a more diverse pool of data and tech professionals, and changing the profile of the industry over time.
Our colleague Charlotte talks about her career in data so far, which includes roles in USA and Australia before settling in with us as an Analytical Engineering Manager in our Underwriting team.
How it all started
I got a Bachelor’s of Science in Classical Mathematics from West Virginia State University, with minors in Accounting and Finance. My career in insurance started while still in university, where I completed an internship in an underwriting department for a commercial insurer.
Upon graduating, I started full time at the company as a Commercial Underwriter Rep in the USA, moving into a commercial underwriting role in Australia a year later. While I enjoyed the social and customer aspects of my roles, I soon realised I wanted a more technical role, where I could go deeper into the details of the data and help steer the analytical solutions we were using to price our insurance products. This led me to starting my career at Hastings as a Trainee Actuary and studying towards my actuarial qualification.
During my time in the actuarial team, I got involved with some more data engineering style projects, which really highlighted to me the value in having the domain knowledge and understanding of the data when designing data solutions for others to use and how much more opportunity this can unlock. This led me to my current role in analytical engineering, which has so far focused on bringing my analytical background to the data extracts we’re building as a team.
Having a background in mathematics but knowing I wanted to be more on the application side helped me see how data can help drive decisions and the impact of different data points and statistics in all elements of life, which got me interested in a career in data.
Skills that have helped me in my career
When working with data, it helps to be curious as you’re frequently required to question what you see in the data and dive deep to find insights and explanations. Also, storytelling skills are useful as it helps you explain your findings to stakeholders.
Experience with visualisations and graphing will help too as often the best way to show insights in data to stakeholders is by clearly presenting them through visualisations.
My advice for those looking to start a career in data
There are lots of free online resources that help you get to grips with different commonly used tools and technologies. I would suggest investing some time in learning some of these if you want to start a career in data as it will help you leverage the power of data and demonstrate your knowledge.
It’s important to have more women, and diversity in general, working in data as the insights taken from data can be interpreted in many ways, so diversity in those working with the data allows us to cover more of these different insights and viewpoints in the solutions we design, making them more dynamic.
Are you interested in starting a career in tech with an inclusive, supportive company? Take a look at our opportunities and apply.