What's your job about?

As a data graduate, my role is to develop data products that help people focus on what truly matters through automating the manual process.

Imagine you have a candy jar. Each day, you add different types of candy and take some out to eat. At the end of the day, you record the remaining amount of each type. By the end of the month, you need to manually calculate how many candies you have of each type based on the daily data. This process is manageable if you have just one jar. But what if you have 100, 1,000, or even more, each containing 10 different types of candy?

Imagine you have a sensor that automatically tracks the candy data—recording the type, quantity, and other details. The data is stored automatically, and at the end of the month, a computer program generates a report summarizing your entire candy inventory. With this automation, you no longer need to manually collect, document, and calculate the data, yet you still get all the insights you need.

Now replace "candy data" with staff leave data—that’s the project I’ve been working on for the past two months. We built an automated system for the People Experience department to store, calculate, and update leave data each month. By the end of the month, the data is compiled into various reports and sent to managers automatically. This gives managers a clear picture of their staff's leave balances, allowing them to encourage employees to plan their time off.

What's your background?

I grew up in China and came to New Zealand for a gap year after graduating from university. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I tried a many random things—planting strawberries, selling elephant-themed T-shirts online, running Facebook ads, building websites etc. While creating websites for clients, I found coding quite fun so I decided to return to university to study software development, thinking I would become a software developer.

I first learned about data engineering from a talk by Qrious, where they shared how they use data to improve the performance of the New Zealand Cricket team. It reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Moneyball, where data was used to build a winning baseball team. In the movie, they handled the data manually, but Qrious used code to process and analyze it, which I found even more fascinating.

When I applied for the Contact Energy Graduate Program, I had no prior experience in data engineering. However, I worked on a personal project where I collected and analyzed comments from a YouTuber I liked. I then used ChatGPT to extract insights and suggestions from the comments and sent an email to the YouTuber explaining my findings and the process I used. To my surprise, he replied! While the project wasn’t technically complex, it was a great story that showed my curiosity and willingness to learn and build. I later realized that these two qualities are exactly what employers look for when hiring graduates.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Yes! Here are three things I’ve learned after a year in my job:

• While having some programming knowledge before you start is helpful, it’s not essential. You can pick up tools and processes through hands-on experience.
• Technical ability is only one part of the job. Strong communication, problem-solving, and collaboration skills are equally or even more important.
• From my observations, the best engineers are curious, have a growth mindset, are always eager to learn, can break down problems into small chunks, ask for help when needed etc

What's the coolest thing about your job?

The data team has a vision to improve data literacy across other departments, so we are encouraged to share stories about our work. I've always enjoyed creating—whether it's making videos or writing articles—so being part of the data team has given me many opportunities to create content. The best moments in my work are when I publish a piece of content and someone tells me it was really inspiring/helpful/valuable. In those moments, I feel a true sense of connection

What are the limitations of your job?

Starting a new project and writing fresh code is always exciting, but that's not always the reality. A significant part of the job involves maintaining existing code and fixing issues. When old code breaks, you often have to go back and fix it. However, if the code was written a while ago or by someone else, it may take a while to fully understand the code, identify the issue and it.

3 pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

• You are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. All you are entitled to are your actions.
• When you achieve success, recognize that other factors also played a role, and stay humble.
• When you fail, remember that some things are beyond your control, so be kind to yourself. Take your actions and let the outcome be.