Data day existence
Techie Caroline is an analyst at Argos
NEXT time you shop online at Argos, the odds are technology whizz Caroline Clark has had something to do with it.
Uber-techie Caroline, 30, from south west London, spends her working days at what is called the Tech Club as a Machine Learning Engineer, analysing data, working out patterns and then enhancing the website. That all sounds horribly complicated In a nutshell, I look at data to establish algorithms, which are patterns or sets of rules, so that our shoppers have a better and simpler online experience.
For instance, we know customers like to use their mobiles to check what is in stock, and possibly order for collection or delivery, so I look at how best we can make that happen. We develop our own innovative technology, rather than buying it in. In a rapidly changing shopping environment, this means we can develop solutions such as nationwide same-day Fast Track delivery.
We have a lot of data and lots of shoppers’ “journeys” to look at. I work with the rest of IT, from engineers to software developers. Are you a tad obsessed? There’s no doubt that when I have a problem I keep working in it until I solve it. Once I even had a dream that answered the problem and I woke up able to fix it. That’s only happened once!
Otherwise, it’s all down to lots of reading and research, much of which I do at home, to think things through. I love rock climbing, but I can’t do too much thinking then, but when I go for a run I’ll often be mulling things over. How did you get to be a queen of tech? As a little girl I loved building things like Lego. That led to a passion for science. I studied Physics at university and did a PhD where I joined the theoretical physics team and studied cosmology.
That’s all about analysing data and I realised how much I enjoyed it. I was looking at things like the evolution of the universe and trying to uncover patterns and hidden signals in the data. Did you get to meet the man himself, Professor Stephen Hawking? Yes, I did meet him once and spoke to him briefly when I was a second year undergraduate. It was so exciting to get the opportunity, and very inspiring.
Doing research at Imperial College during my PhD was an exciting time, being surrounded by inspirational researchers like him who are at the top of the field. How come you didn’t stay in the academic world? I had the chance to go to the University of Toronto but I thought I’d have a look at teaching and spent two years teaching physics and maths at A-Level.
I missed the day-to-day science though and although I was always doing my own projects at home I decided to get a job which would allow me to do it all day, every day. After a few months as a data scientist for the Royal Mail a friend told me about this job at Argos. I saw the chance to be a part of cutting edge technology and I joined the team in November 2016. FIND A TECHIE JOB Whether you already have techie skills or fancy starting out in the world of IT we have found 22,933 jobs and training opportunities.
At fish4jobs.co.uk there are 1,453 vacancies ranging from a senior server engineer in Plymouth (£33,000 to £40,000) and an IT support assistant in Oldham (£19,819 to £23,111) to a senior IT technician in Cambridge (£23,866 to £25,463) and a web developer/designer in East Riding (£20,000 to £25,000).
There are another 3,189 jobs at gov.uk/jobsearch including a senior IT technician in Swindon (£19,092 to £26,198), an IT technician in Poole (£18,500 to £22,000) and an IUT consultant in London (£30,000 to £32,000).
We spotted 6,237 tech jobs at uk.dice. com such as a Java developer (£65,000) and an automation tester, both in London (£70,000).
We also found a further 10,609 jobs of all types from software engineers to web developers at cwjobs.co.uk.
If you’re starting out, an apprenticeship could be the right route to a successful career. We found 1,295 opportunities at getingofar.gov.uk.
Meanwhile, if you fancy working alongside Caroline, Argos (argos. careers) is searching for 150 permanent technology and digital specialists.
The new roles range from graduates right up to principal level and include software development engineers, software engineering managers, machine learning engineers, Big Data engineers and product managers.
Meeting Stephen Hawking was an inspiration