I fell back in love with learning.In 2017, I found myself desiring a new career. I had amassed 10+ years of customer service management experience, but I felt like there was very little left for me to explore. This realization kickstarted my research initiative to figure out what I wanted to do. I was interested in the IT field, but I could not see myself being a developer or systems administrator. That is when I stumbled upon IT Business Analysis. It combined my interests in collaborating with talented developers, designers, and analysts with my sales, interviewing, and customer-focused soft skills.The curriculum for IT Business Analysis requires students to take a fundamentals class in both programming and databases. Despite my initial response of not wanting to be a developer, I quickly fell in love with programming. For the next 18 months, I took as many programming classes as I could fit into my schedule. I became hooked on programming. It was a brand-new skill set that is almost infinite in the depth of what you can learn. There is still much for me to learn, but this skill set is critical in building rapport with developers. During my IT Business Analysis capstone project, I worked with a team of software developers. Speaking a common language allowed us to truly collaborate on some innovative approaches to solving our client’s problem.As I was nearing the end of my diploma, I learned about Product Management as a career path and became quickly enamoured. I attended any networking event that I expected Product Managers to participate in so that I had the opportunity to learn about their career stories. As I learned more, the desire to attain this role grew. I knew that I wanted to help solve customer problems with a talented cross-functional team. The flexibility and high level of growth you find within the tech industry ensure that I will never reach the end of my learning journey. I specialize in customer discovery interviews, process analysis, and discovering pain points for users. Additionally, I make ample use of my software framework (MVC), programming (C#, PHP, HTML/CSS), and design (Illustrator, Adobe XD, Photoshop) abilities to collaborate with internal stakeholders. I am currently improving my data analysis and visualization skills in one of my last classes in BTech. I am immediately drawn to how quickly I can provide meaningful visualizations in Tableau from a data set. Additionally, the power of R has me enamoured at the possible analysis to perform on a variety of data sets.
