SHIFTING NUMBERS

IN THE MALE-DOMINATED PROFESSION OF DATA ANALYTICS, NOLLIE MAOTO TOOK HER OPPORTUNITIES AND LANDED A JOB SHE IS TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT. HERE, SHE TELLS US MORE ABOUT ALL THINGS DATA

- JOANNE CAREW

NOLLIE MAOTO WAS MOST OF THE WAY TO BECOMING AN ACCOUNTANT – SHE even completed three years of a Chartered Accountant degree – before realising that it wasn’t the field for her. A fascination with stock exchanges and the colourful data screens of Wall Street traders inspired her to study investing instead.

Then, while working at a consulting firm, she developed a deep interest in analytics and data, which is the business of extracting key business information from very large sets of records and data.

Today she is the chief data and analytics officer for a division of FNB that boasts one of the biggest data analytics operations in South Africa. She spoke to Tech to explain what her job entails and debunked a few myths about the profession along the way.

How did you first get into data analytics? 

While I was working in management consulting, I befriended our Business Intelligence team and started hanging around with them in my free time, like my lunches and breaks, learning about what they do. Seeing all these graphs and all of this data on their screens made me think that maybe this is where I was meant to be.

I knew how to code in C++ and Java, but they were coding in SQL, so I started teaching myself how to code in SQL. I was creating reports and dashboards, but I had nobody to share them with. Eventually, while working with one of our clients, I did a situational analysis and was advised to share my insights with our managing director, but I couldn’t get a meeting with him.