Visagio Australia was originally a management consulting company, but we have grown to become so much more even in the 6 months that I’ve been here to be a larger business transformation platform. Basically, if a business needs specific help in how it is run, we can offer them a solution to their problems. I firmly sit on the consulting side of the company, currently working with a large mining player in Perth aiming to create tools that visualise the performance of their mine sites. These tools can be as small as one truck on a single day or as large as multiple sites compared against each other over a year. My daily work will usually be comprised of bug fixes in our existing products raised by our customers and creating new tools for measuring performance. However, I’ve also recently done some managing of our team when more experienced members were on leave. This includes working with our customers face to face rather than just developing our products and it really has improved my people skills. Outside of the project I’ve also had the opportunity to do important work within Visagio such as taking part in our recruitment process and our Wellness, Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (WIDE) team. This is a nice change of pace for me and centres around our purpose as a company rather than the day to day of project work. Overall, it’s a blast working here at Visagio and an amazing start to my career.
I grew up in Perth and have lived here my whole life, so my preference has always been to stay here which I’ve been lucky enough to have in my studies and career up to this point. I studied at Curtin University and while I was there was shown that consulting was a potential career path which hadn’t occurred to me as an option since I was initially considering data science or further qualification to become an actuary in my future.
After this was brought up by my course coordinator in my second year, I went looking for internships in a wide number of industries with consulting amongst them which I ended up interning in. This was for a month in January 2021 and wasn’t quite the experience I was hoping for. With only a month on the job, I wasn’t given the time to properly grow into the role and be handed real responsibilities so when I was offered an internship with Visagio six months later, I jumped on it.
This internship wasn’t over summer and allowed me to both study and take part in the internship growing my skills while I finished my degree. My internship was only three months long as I was in my final semester, but most interns will do a year or even more part-time, getting some proper experience even if they don’t end up working at Visagio after their studies. I’m now a full-timer at Visagio having been in this role for six months.
Yes, I absolutely believe someone from a different background could do my job as we have a broad range of people at Visagio doing similar jobs. We have engineering, mathematics, business, computer science and of course actuarial science majors here all achieving similar goals.
Obviously certain areas of study and professional experience will lend you to specific areas of specialisation such as automation, people management or data visualisation, but a lot of what I’ve done was learned on the job which required some fundamentals that would be picked up in STEM degrees at university or learned in our internal training courses.
The best part of my job is the amazing number of people I can work with on a regular basis. Obviously, there is my project team who I see every day along with my client’s team, but we also get to work with the wider Visagio team regularly. Whenever I need to work on something unfamiliar like a new coding language or a different piece of software it’s very easy to reach out and get an expert within Visagio to spend an hour of their time with you.
A limitation for me came from the lack of teaching available to me when I started as I was hired outside of the usual recruitment period, so the courses offered to other students when they started were available to me after a few months in. We do have the materials online to learn from and my colleague on my first project was very accommodating to teach me these things but there was a sense of being thrown in the deep end if this is your first experience in the professional world.
My number one piece of advice for myself in university is not to stress so much about getting a job right out of uni. I did end up getting one, but it’s not the end of the world if your first opportunity doesn’t come along until a little bit later
My next piece of advice is to say yes to things you’re passionate about. You can worry about time spent doing “proper” work, but this is your chance to make a difference at your workplace so try to make it a better place.
Finally, do what makes you happy. Not what makes everyone else happy.