I was introduced to the world of data analytics at the University of Antwerp. I followed courses on advanced statistics and learned about topics like probabilistic modelling and machine learning. After 5 years, I earned my master’s in business engineering, a program centred around bridging the gap between technical and business perspectives.

Inspired by recent developments in technology, I decided to pursue another degree. This time, I went to the KU Leuven to deep dive in the world of Artificial Intelligence. In my first semester, I got in touch with the element61 team and ended up doing a 4-month internship during which I wrote my master's thesis.

Prior to starting at element61, I worked for two years at a multinational IT firm. While I was able to learn a lot on a technical aspect, I felt that I was missing out on quite some learning opportunities due to a lack of internal knowledge sharing. This combined with the fact that I was stuck on the same project for over 1,5 years, triggered me to reach out to element61.

In September 2022, I started as a Analytics Analyst in the Data Science & Analysis team. After some weeks of training, I was immediately onboarded on 3 projects in diverse sectors, including logistics and manufacturing. As I got the opportunity to work on these projects together with experienced colleagues, I was able to get up to speed quickly and start contributing.

During my first year, I got the chance to further develop my technical skills by working on a wide variety of projects. On top of that, I was also encouraged to grow more on non-technical topics. I started taking up project management topics like learning to identify new opportunities, planning project budgets & timelines, and occasionally helping in sales meetings.

One project that I really loved revolved around the creation of a full-blown BI tool to support technicians during machine maintenance visits. I got the chance to work with IoT data coming from machines and visualize it in a brand-new Power BI app, to be used by over 150 people.

What I value the most about working at element61 is the mindset of continuous learning and self-development, the wide variety of projects and topics to work on, and the flexibility and encouragement to grow in the direction you want to. For me, it’s the ideal place to kickstart my career.