Alumni story: Sven, data analyst and Youtuber

I realized that I am more of a numbers person during my business administration studies. Hence, during my studies, I specialized in financial cost controlling & international accounting. I then completed my first internship in the cost controlling department at my current employer. I enjoyed analyzing data in Excel. In particular, I loved extracting insights from data and using visualization to communicate my findings effectively. At that time, I knew that I wanted to continue my professional career as a business analyst.

Throughout my career, I have been involved in many Data Analytics & Process Automation projects. Especially for automating tasks, I have been using VBA, a programming language for Excel and other Office programs. I also have been tinkering around with Python and got interested in using Python to support data-driven decision-making in our company. Besides doing online courses, I thought the most effective way of learning might be to immerse myself in coding fully. After doing a quick google search, I came across the Data Science course from Le Wagon Tokyo.

I applied to the Data Science bootcamp for three main reasons. The first reason was the overall curriculum. It covered all the topics I was interested in. Secondly, I liked that people who want to enroll should have some coding experience. In that case, we could dive right into the fun topics without spending too much time on the basics. And lastly, the 9-week time frame was just perfect. I carried over some vacation days from the previous year, and my company also allowed me to take some additional training days. That allowed me to pretty much complete the bootcamp during a 2-month long “vacation”.

It was a challenging but also very fun experience. Challenging because we cover a wide variety of topics, such as data analysis, statistics, Machine & Deep learning and data Engineering in a very condensed period. Yet, at the same time, I also enjoyed having the possibility to focus on learning and coding solely. And being in such a friendly & supportive environment while solving coding related tasks made the whole experience even better.

Recently, I have transitioned from a business analysis position into a solutions developer role in the same company. We are implementing a new planning software called IBM Planning Analytics in the current project. The implementation includes the requirements capturing, development, testing, deployment and documentation. Furthermore, I am designing and developing Python & VBA solutions to automate repetitive tasks and accelerate internal workflows. 

While watching some YouTube videos about combining Python and Excel, I noticed that many tutorials did not apply to a real-world business scenario. In most tutorials, the sample Excel data was already in a suitable and tidy format. Yet, speaking from experience, Excel files in companies are often not that easy to handle. You can find all kinds of different preferences to organize data, like merging cells or spreading out data across multiple sheets or workbooks. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, I have found myself spending more time at home, and I wanted to make use of that time. I thought sharing my code and solutions online regarding practical tips on Python and VBA in a business setting might be helpful to someone. After receiving my first positive feedback on YouTube, I got motivated to create more tutorials. And this is how my YouTube journey started.

After 1.5 years and over 70 videos later, around 11k people decided to subscribe to my channel. That number is pretty mind-blowing to me, especially when you consider that it took me almost 6 months to reach 100 subscribers. Even though I love numbers, I try not to focus too much on the YouTube stats. For me, I enjoy that I can express my creativity through coding & creating videos.