Data Management Analyst Review

I do a lot of different work in both Data Quality and Data Management. PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets (creating a Data Dictionary template for capturing Metadata, managing a Query Log containing questions about Data Quality etc), lot's of emails, 20% of my time spent doing an apprenticeship course, working as part of a CEO Challenge team to create a project that helps charities, designing process flows, sometimes automating things with code, and so on...

I've learned tons of new skills, and expanded on others! Teamwork, communication, emailing, PowerPoint, Excel, presentation, Data Quality, Data Management, taking minutes, critical thinking, creating process flow diagrams, Data Science (Python, machine learning, SQL etc). It's sometimes been very stressful because every time I get on top of what I'm doing, I get thrown new work that I don't know how to do. However, it's worth it!

I'm looking to become a Data Scientist, and maybe even a Machine Learning Engineer, and so I do find my work as a Data Analyst quite mundane at times, but I do feel like I'm building a great foundation on which to build, and this company tends to attract very capable (and often kind/honest) people, which helps pull you up, and that's great! I really enjoy the training aspect of my apprenticeship course.

It's a pretty well-structured program, and the learning rate for me as been extremely fast. My one quarrel with this program is that the CEO Challenge (for people on graduate schemes, but they've recently included apprentices) is not allocated any actual time. What I mean is we get 20% of our time to do apprenticeship activity, but that gets used by the apprenticeship course alone, and then you are left with no time for the CEO Challenge. They should allocate 5-10% of our time to the CEO Challenge.

Well, I've heard that the FCA is one of the best employers for providing support, and they do accommodate any disabilities, which is great! I've not really asked for much support from my employer yet, so I can't provide a full assessment, but it does appear to be very good!

Support from our training provider is pretty good. Our provider is Cambridge Spark, and they do seem to have high standards, and so I feel the support is strong enough. Always room for improvement here though, but no real complaints. The KATE platform they use is extremely good, and it makes learning an accelerated experience.

I'm learning a lot of techniques with Python (especially the Pandas library), and I'm also learning a lot about statistical techniques. I feel like I've learned a huge amount already, and I have no doubt that the training will help me transition to becoming a Data Scientist or MLE, but I haven't actually used it in my job yet.

The opportunity for extra-curricular activities at the Financial Conduct Authority is definitely present. It looks like they have a good variety of things to do, but I haven't had the chance to test any yet because I joined this company during the Covid-19 Pandemic, and I'm not that in to virtual activities.

Yes

The benefits at the Financial Conduct Authority are very numerous: good pay, good work-life balance, friendly, unusually honest, capable people. It is not the place for everyone though. The cons are: everything takes a long time to progress due to approvals, not the best place to get promoted (probably because people above you don't want to leave, so that says a lot!), big company means you are often a small cog in a larger system. However, overall the pros far outweigh the cons, and for the right person, the benefits of working at the FCA are probably the best you will find.

The best advice I can give, is to tailor your application to the FCA's following 5 core values: 1) Deliver in the public interest, 2) Act with integrity, 3) Be ambitious, 4) Work Inclusively, 5) Connect & Deliver. I did bear this in mind when I applied, but I didn't realise just how obsessed the FCA is about these core values. You can find more information about these core values via the following link: https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/corporate/fca-values-core-skills.pdf