Introduction
Hello dear reader,
It is me, the guy being pointed at by the arrow on the picture. I am Pol, freshly graduated in Business Engineering in information systems at the biggest Belgian university (KU Leuven). During my last semester, I searched for an internship to broaden my knowledge in data analysis. Luckily, Power Partners was searching for interns, and it became a great match. I already had Power BI and Python experience (through student projects), but this internship brought my knowledge to the next level. I got to try out many parts of the business:
- The data engineering part: getting the data ready for the analysis
- The data analysis part: building interesting graphs and KPIs
- The marketing part: making LinkedIn posts
- The sales part: reaching new customers
In the following paragraphs I will share more information about what I did and what I learned for each of those parts.
Data Engineering
This is the most technical part of the start-up, and it is the one Tereza, my co-worker at Power Partners, masters. For this part, programming knowledge is needed (we currently use Python). I found this part very interesting, as I faced multiple challenges.
The first challenge is how to access the data automatically (with an API). Then, it is important to know how the data will be modelled and how to achieve this goal. Therefore, multiple transformations are needed: keeping the right information, changing data formats, ….
Another challenge is to have a good data governance: making sure the data stays correct and usable during its entire lifecycle. A last challenge I will mention is to have a good communication with the team to understand each other’s code quickly and split the tasks efficiently.
Data analysis
This is the part the client pays the most attention to. As a data analyst, you should make beautiful and very useful graphs that will impress them. Attention to detail is key. With a strong client focus, I needed to tell the story they wanted to know about, with a good separation of the different points of interest (one report for HR for example, another about client projects, …).
Power BI is the tool we use, and it is very intuitive. I even got the chance to get a certification called the ‘DA-100, Analysing Data with Microsoft Power BI’. This is a great learning module to get to know every functionality of Power BI. So, once I started doing projects I knew exactly where to search for functionalities that Power Partners usually uses. An example of a project I participated in is the DestinAir dashboard.
Marketing
This was probably the most creative part of my internship. First, I did a marketing calendar where I searched every possible type of post I could do and searched for interesting content. It felt great to finally share my bad humour to the world (e.g. the survey about obese people. Don’t forget to read the comment explaining the voluntary spelling mistake).
Then, on a weekly basis I posted content on our channels. I prepared and enjoyed seeing the reactions of people and analysed which type of posts were doing better (spoiler alert: team pictures are the most successful).
Sales
For sales, we had a good strategy where we build custom dashboards for the leads and reached them by mail to share it. It was a campaign Christoph and Jules designed about a year ago for the Flemish market.
Me as a native French speaker, I remodeled the campaign to fit for the companies in Brussels and Wallonia. You can find the dashboard in our gallery under "Financial Evolution". Responses where positive and convincing them to do projects with us was the biggest challenge.
Final words
The flexibility of learning was great, as I participated in many activities of the company. Everybody was always ready for help when I needed it. We also had team events, for example the monthly lunch, that was always a great moment (see picture above the article).
I am thankful that I have come across Christoph, Jules, Isabelle, Tereza and Karim. All of them are great and professional people and I really recommend you get to know them better if you can.
Word from the team: Thanks a lot Pol for contributing to this BI journey, we enjoyed working with you a lot and wish you all the best in your future (BI) career!
