Welcome Rhian, an Academy Trainee Web Analyst

Thank you. It’s been a positive experience so far! It's been brilliant working with everyone; they are super knowledgeable and friendly.

It’s a little daunting but inspiring to work with a bunch of people with a wealth of knowledge on some really varied but fascinating subjects.

Having been in the working world before going back to university, I appreciate there aren’t many opportunities for the amount of career development and support you get here, and it’s been lovely to see how consistently that’s been followed through on.

There's so much that this industry can do, and a lot of that can be genuinely positively impactful for people, but there are a lot of ethical questions to navigate. I think it's incredibly important to keep at the forefront of your mind. You can help a charity reach and understand its key audiences and get them in front of the people that need their help, or on the extreme, examples like Cambridge Analytica.

Rhian Barber, Trainee Web Analyst

To put it simply, it looked like a great opportunity!

I'd recently graduated with my BSc in Marketing and Management; if there was anything I wanted to do specifically related to my degree, it was always going to be more in the analytics or otherwise technical side of things. The initial chat with Julian and the interview process solidified that this was a great opportunity and (I hope) a great fit!

Through a listing on my university's job board. Coming out of university, like anyone, I’d applied for many jobs, but this was the one I’d been hoping to hear back from, so I was over the moon to get the job.

I think the best way to put it is my marketing degree has informed a lot of the background thinking behind my understanding of this role. I was very aware that at university, you’re taught a lot of theory, and it takes time to pull that properly through into the workplace.

But it’s been helpful when analysing the different organisations we’ve been working with and understanding how they need to be analysed based on their individual needs, requirements, niches, etc. There are also a few times I've referred to old lecture notes at work, most recently with an audience segmentation proposal for a client’s website traffic.

Several assignments fed into different elements of digital marketing, but I think the best thing I've done was take a couple of extracurricular coding courses alongside my degree.

Understanding at a baseline level what happens behind a computer screen has been a massive help in then understanding the potential and limitations of digital marketing: what's being collected, how it's being collected, how it's being used in the broader context, what's not okay to be tracking, and safeguarding measures.

Feeling like you can offer people something genuinely helpful and provide fixes and suggestions for best practices has been amazing, but I think it always comes back to ethics! Knowing that line between what can be done and what is not just okay but fair is important to me.

There's so much that this industry can do, and a lot of that can be genuinely positively impactful for people, but there are a lot of ethical questions to navigate. I think it's incredibly important to keep this at the forefront of your mind. You can help a charity reach and understand its key audiences and get them in front of the people that need their help, or on the extreme, examples like Cambridge Analytica.

With my degree, I definitely did, but it was a case of trying to figure out how to carve it more into a career I wanted than one I fell into, if that makes sense.

A few weeks before seeing that ad vacancy, I'd tried to create a plan to try and push my career down the analytics route. This job pushed me ahead so far in my plan- even just that made it kind of the luckiest opportunity to get!

There's also the thing of trying where possible to ensure the job you're doing is something that you find interesting, that you're around good people, and in a supportive workplace culture, Fresh Egg hits all of those components. I know there's a massive amount of privilege and luck in saying that. It's just been a fortunate opportunity to get.

There's always so much more to learn. I feel a bit like a magpie in a room of shiny objects! I'm enjoying working with GTM and Looker at the moment, and everything about consent mode is interesting to me. Still, I'd love to work towards having a look at BigQuery eventually.

I’ve indeed been introduced to it at an exciting time! How little was being discussed in the broader industry given the potential scale of impact of Consent Mode V2 being rolled out was a little surprising.

I haven't been too extensive with it just yet, but I have used it to check some errors in JavaScript coding: it takes a few attempts, but it eventually points out the problem!

Something with computers and spreadsheets- I think some of them think I still work in payroll.

Excel. I'm joking, and I'm very much not. I have a spreadsheet I revamp every year to automate my food shopping list. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to make it scrape supermarket websites so I can automatically update ingredients and prices and if I can use a CASE WHEN formula to speed up inputting recipes. Otherwise, I have a long series of rotating hobbies, like video games, knitting, writing, drawing, and plants; I get hyperfocused on something for a few weeks and forget it exists for another year!

I flip-flop between a simple fried egg on toast and a vegan tofu scramble.