Alumni story: from banker to data consultant

PROMO 2023

Victor Errotaberea

Data Consultant 

Read Victor's inspiring testimonial!

What was your background before enrolling on the course?

My name is Victor and I studied management. I used to work in a bank that financed cinema and the cultural industries in France and Europe. I liked what I was doing, but for a long time I'd wanted to do something more technical and data-oriented. So I took the plunge and started from scratch. I had to train.

How did you hear about the School of Data?

When I was applying for a job as a data scientist at Artefact, I came across the School of Data, which offered training in professions such as data scientist, data analyst and data engineer. I looked at the content of the programmes and quickly realised that it was a very technically advanced course, so it was exactly what I was looking for. It's the ideal course for my career change, as it will enable me to improve my skills in all the technical tools that I didn't know.

What did you enjoy during your data engineering training?

The advantage of this course is that it is a hybrid course. Each day you choose whether you want to be face-to-face or distance learning. The teachers are present every day in physics, which means we can quickly build up our skills and get help when we get stuck on a subject. The course is 90% practical and 10% theoretical. This really helps us to become technically strong and up to the level demanded by companies and recruiters. During the 10 weeks of training, we work in pairs on data challenges and, when we manage to explain to our partner how to solve or make progress on a problem, it's very gratifying.

The big bonus of the training is the mentoring! My mentor was a senior data consultant at Artefact. He was able to guide me in my career choices when I was hesitating about whether to become a data consultant or a data scientist. He also explained to me how a client project works and how a data consultancy works.

During the course, you're immersed in the Artefact consultancy, so you can meet and talk to data experts (data analysts, data scientists and data consultants) who work on international customer challenges on a daily basis. I was able to ask all my questions about their jobs, project management and tips on the latest data tools in vogue. Thanks to the training, I've gone from using Excel exclusively to mastering all the data tools that are essential for being agile and productive on assignments. I'm now able to clean, process, analyse and predict data.

The big advantage of the course is that I have a mentor with me throughout the bootcamp. He's a data expert from Artefact who's there to guide me, answer my questions about my career choices and help me with the interviews. I'm very happy with this course, which I'd recommend to anyone who wants to embark on a data career. It's intensive but professional, and we work on real cases encountered by the world's biggest companies.

What are your career plans?

I intend to combine my management skills with my new expertise in data to become a data consultant.