Livadata

As we seem to be starting 2026 with nostalgia, I’ve seen many reflections across social media in recent weeks of what we were all up to in 2016. You might hear millennial women talk about “2016 makeup”, as the year seemed to mark when many of us seemed to finally figure out winged eyeliner and time has stood still since (just me? no?)

Where are you going with this Megan I hear you ask? Well bear with me. I’m often asked how I landed the job I have that I enjoy so much. What I studied, where I learned. How does one become a Power BI fangirl? And so as I’ve flicked through various 2016 throwback posts, I’ve found myself reflecting too. Ten years ago, I was skiing in the French Alps for a season with no degree, no plan, and no idea that data would become my career, never mind my calling.

I had always excelled at school, but as those who know me will not be surprised to hear, I was in a rush to get to the next step. I applied to university in my 5th year of high school, and was accepted to Strathclyde Business School. After two months of attending aged 17, being too young to go to freshers events, I found myself struggling to find my people. In the meantime, I had been working at Carphone Warehouse. My colleagues there quickly became my people, and shaped large parts of my personality you still see today. As I sat in a Business Enterprise lecture hearing about ‘the great minds of business’ I remember so clearly being told “In 4 years, you’ll learn to think just like them!”, and in my arrogance I thought, I think like that now. The theory of this isn’t going to teach me anything. And in true cosmic timing, my boss Aby texted me “Megan there’s a massive queue here. If you finish uni early come clock on we need you!” I stood up, walked out, and never attended another lecture again. Instead, I spent what would have been my uni years selling phones, insurance and becoming ‘The Accessory Queen’ (who doesn’t love an add-on bonus?)

What I always find so funny when I look back on my time hustling phone contracts and working 50 hour weeks in retail, is how clear it was then where my career would go. I became known for my eccentric wall displays in stock room corridors, made of scraps of wallpaper, wrapping paper and whatever else I could get my hands on. Commission trackers where the team would whack a sticker on a chart so we could visualise the volume and quality of our sales in real time.

This picture was snapped in 2013 to send to the team WhatsApp when I returned from a week of holiday to see only 3 of my colleagues had remembered to put their stickers on. Adherence to Data Quality sure did look different then… maybe angry selfies snapped next to Power BI dashboards is a new approach my team need to trial for our clients? In all seriousness though, I remember realising at the time that driving change through insight was something I seemed to be great at, and really enjoyed. I remember asking people “how do I get a job like that” before I had any language to describe what it was. I was told “you need to live in London and have a degree for jobs like that”. So I parked that ambition, and my next move from Carphone Warehouse was to run a Clarins beauty counter.

Aged 20, I was woefully under prepared to run a team. Being responsible for not just my own success but the performance and engagement of others (some of whom had worked in the industry as long as I’d been walking!) was a shock to the system. I could plan events, my numbers were on point, and my customers loved me. But packaging all that up into influence of others was something I wasn’t quite ready for. That was the first time I learned that being good at something is not the same as being good through people; a lesson that would come back years later when I finally stepped into leadership again.

And that is how I found myself skiing around the French Alps in 2016, contemplating what I wanted to do with myself next. Without any exposure to the data world, and with my now beloved Power BI having just hit the market the year before, I had no idea what to pursue other than I didn’t want to be in retail anymore. I took an administration job at Nationwide Building Society – and thank goodness I did because the girl at the next desk became one of my dearest friends, and ten years later we live in London together.

Then came one of those pub conversations that went on to pivot my entire career. A friend was having a great time working for FDM Group, and let me know they had space in their sales team. A good word got me in the door, and something about my approach convinced them to take a chance and offer me the job. As FDM Group’s Sales Analyst for Scotland, I landed my first reporting job. With an Excel masterclass courtesy of Jamie Ross, and a Salesforce Admin speed run courtesy of Deep Bachu, I found my feet.

Nothing about my 5 years in retail, my wandering round the Alps or my year in mortgage admin had prepared me for corporate life. My Mum cleans hospitals, and my Dad fits boilers. It was a huge culture shift, and very much a trial by fire! If I could go back and help my 23 year-old self, I would tell her network is everything. Building solid relationships across the organisation – even where there’s seemingly little to gain – can come back to benefit you years down the line. Another right place right time conversation was then the critical moment that set me on the path to Power BI fangirl. Over a lunch with the sales team and FDM’s Head of BI at the time, David Harvey, I got chatting about what I liked about my role. He recommended I look into Power BI, and followed up with a license and some learning materials. Excel reports became dashboards (they might not have went into production but I had fun building!), and I joined one of the SQL classes for a week to give me the foundations.

From there I could take the leap into my first big girl Power BI job at McCurrach, now better known as Avidity Group. An amazingly supportive team in Greg Ronald, Euan Weetch and more saw me finally find my calling. I spent 2.5 years building reporting suites for Tech, FMCG and Financial Services clients. In 2019, I secured my first ever internal promotion. It’s one thing to get a new job, but to be invested in by your own firm is something altogether more special. I worked with Euan to design hand typed M code solutions that to this day are some of my most intricate work. I’ve only ever met one other developer in all my years who opens advanced editor and types M from memory. A dying art perhaps?

From there, it’s not much of a leap to understand how I ended up at Dufrain. As the pandemic hit and our working rhythms changed, the chance to take up a mostly remote role became an option. I felt like a big fish jumping from a small pond to a big ocean at the time. But with each new project, and each new internal initiative, I found my 10 years of seemingly random jobs all culminating in a skill set that has become invaluable. My Del Boy years selling phones, the softer approach supporting Clarins customers and attempting to lead a team, the focussed problem solving at Nationwide, corporate foundations at FDM, and the technical and client exposure at McCurrach left me with this mindset that made a natural consultant.

I was hesitant to step into line management roles again, insisting that I like to stay responsible for things I control – and you can’t control people! But my drive to always push to the next step won out, and with solid coaching from Jen Hamilton and my Dufrain support network, I learned it wasn’t so scary after all when coaching people through something you are so passionate about. I’ve talked before about the success I’ve had in my role, seeing 3 promotions in just over 4 years. None of which happens without the right support network to both cheer you on and keep you in check.

I’ve gone on to find as I chat to others that data is often a career we fall into without intent, especially among women or school leavers who didn’t pursue higher education. Learning SQL, Python, Power BI or whatever else all becomes secondary to the inquisitive nature and natural ability to look at things differently when you want to truly succeed in data. As we see more push for automation and global spread of resources, it’s going to be critical to ensure pathways for random shop girls like me to fall into Data & AI roles. The leaders of tomorrow have to come from somewhere, and when I consider the “right place right time” conversations that had to happen to land me in this field I love so much, I wonder how my 2016 self would fare if she landed back from the Alps to our current job market. One thing I can say for sure… if you told Carphone Warehouse Megs that her future lay in leading teams of extraordinary people to build her tissue paper chaos trackers at scale, she’d probably have a wee cry… and then ask “WHEN?!!!”