Seize the opportunity: Relocating to accelerate my career with Kubrick

I joined Kubrick in October 2022 to train in their Data Management practice after graduating from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in Political Science and Global Studies. Funnily enough, I learned my first coding language in a political science class, which isn’t the most obvious environment to begin a journey in data. I didn’t exactly know what I was getting myself into, but when I realized that data could drive analysis and solve problems in any sector, I knew the possibilities were endless for my future, and for others’; I ended my college career as a teaching assistant for ‘Data in Politics’ to help inspire other young women to take on the world of data and realize the opportunities within.

To continue my own journey, Kubrick was the perfect next step. As someone eager to nourish their skills and drive value with data, I knew Kubrick was the right fit for me. Though I was coming from the world of social sciences, Kubrick’s recruitment process made me feel confident in my experience and the skills I could apply to technology challenges. Training was intense and fast-paced but prepared me for the variety of skills required on client projects. We practiced the agile methodology by designing a mobile application within our pods to learn the importance of articulating the business value of your product to stakeholders. Next, we explored the capabilities and mastered the foundational skills in Python and SQL, with a focus on data quality and cleansing for accurate analytics. In turn, we traversed our way through the niches of Collibra’s tooling to understand more conceptual data topics such as data governance, data lineage, and metadata. Finally, we ended our training with a project for a leading Banking organization to apply our skills and deliver solutions which improved the efficiency of their data management processes and added capability to their Collibra instance.

Joining Kubrick meant relocating from North Carolina to New York for part of our hybrid training. After spending my childhood years on a farm in North Carolina, I knew I wanted to live somewhere bigger. Now, don’t get me wrong: there are a thousand reasons why I miss the Appalachian Mountains. Being close to nature, breathing fresh air, and seeing the stars at night are experiences I admit I took for granted. But, somewhere deep inside of me was itching to experience life in the city.

After making it to New York, I was ecstatic to build from scratch, but when training ended and it came time to start thinking about finding an apartment and roommates, the opportunity to take a placement with a client in Boston presented itself. At first, I was totally against it. Moving is hard, making friends is hard, finding roommates is hard, and I had just struggled through it all. Was I really ready to do it again? Yes, I was. Because change is inevitable. Because change is good. Because change is growth. Because I get to live in another city! Because I get to be adventurous! Because I am young! Because why not? I couldn’t let fear overcome the obvious good in this decision. So, I write to you from Boston today with pride in taking the courageous step over the comfortable one. To any future Kubrick consultants, I say be brave.

Kubrick’s range of opportunities with clients across the US has a variety of professional benefits in addition to the personal development of exploring new cities. My flexibility and openness to relocate allowed Kubrick to place me quickly after training finished, so I was ready to continue building on my newly acquired skills and lost no momentum in my development. Due to the similarity between Kubrick’s rigorous training model and my client’s fast-paced culture, the transition felt seamless. Along with a smooth change came accelerated learning by applying my training to my client’s work. After a couple of months of listening to gain context, asking questions to better understand, and building relationships with my team members, my learning has been exponential. In a simple analogy, Kubrick provided the pencils, my client experience has sharpened them, and now I am able to make my mark.

My client has offices in several major U.S. cities, but they wanted their Kubrick consultants to move to Boston specifically to be close to their leadership team, which has been extremely valuable for my development. I’ve been able to build strong relationships with our team leaders and get first-hand exposure to their work and strategic initiatives which are focused on growing long-term business value from data. I’m grateful to have this perspective on the future state and vision of our end goal; it helps me to reorient myself when the demands of day-to-day efforts get blurry.

We are a dynamic team, made of a product owner, scrum master, delivery coordinator, business analyst, and data engineers. Another Kubrick consultant and I joined the team as data managers, or the ‘librarians’ of the platform, as the product owner likes to call us. Our team works on a customer data platform that is linked to several sources for data ingestion and multiple destinations for data exportation. Once the platform is properly socialized to our stakeholders, it will be largely self-service, i.e., users will come into the platform, choose the data they want/need, and send it to their desired destination. As ‘librarians’, we are here to help users locate the data/”books” they’re looking for, decide if new “books” are needed, source the new “books”, and clean the shelves when “books” aren’t relevant anymore. The product owner and business analyst are in charge of strategizing new functionality, managing stakeholders, and providing direction. The scrum master and delivery coordinator assign tasks, keep up with our progress, and keep us connected to other teams that we depend on, while the data engineers develop the platform and are back-end experts. Our Kubrick training was pretty essential for getting us up to speed with the agile methodology we work in, as well as providing the SQL skills I need to navigate the backend of our platform and write queries for specific analytics use cases.

In just a few months, I’m pleased to have already delivered tangible outcomes to help the development of our product and drive its adoption in the wider business team, which is critical for ensuring we gain true business value from it. Our platform houses sensitive customer data, which requires careful documentation. I have created a data dictionary that provides the necessary details about each data element, and, with stakeholder feedback, I have created a taxonomy which is clear for our end users. This is another crucial step in self-service. As a new platform in the business (and as one that is replacing a predecessor), it is important to ease the transition for users. To do this at scale, I have created a comprehensive user guide, with a step-by-step walkthrough of how to use the platform’s functionalities along with important notes, screenshots, an example use case, special scenarios, a terms glossary, and additional resources. In addition to these resources, I have given multiple live demos to socialize the platform as well as to walk specific users through the platform’s functionalities. This way, I can be sure to capture the attention of up to 100 users at once and build confidence in using our exciting new product!

Kubrick’s consulting model has proven to me that the skills I learned in training are going to stay with me for the rest of my career. The rigor of their training program has allowed me to deliver value onsite quickly and keep learning and developing beyond that. The data we now have at our disposal is capable of transforming every industry and requires people from all backgrounds to approach the challenge. I appreciate everyone who took the time to read this piece. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or are considering relocating. To those contemplating their next steps with Kubrick, I'll leave you with this thoughtful question, "what good is a chance if you don't take it?