Charmaine Whittingham, data apprentice, Barclaycard
Who is she?
Charmaine joined Barclaycard data and strategic analytics (DASA) as its first-ever data apprentice in 2017. A former nursery nurse with no data experience, she has worked closely with stakeholders, built her technical skills, presented to the Barclaycard marketing leadership and seen the media channel reporting and analytics project she led adopted.
What did she do?
Despite having no data experience, Charmaine’s attitude and aptitude have made her the toast of Barclaycard DASA and beyond – as a result of the project she led and presented, the marketing department has implemented its own apprenticeship programme. On joining, she was tasked with tackling the way data was being collated and processed in Excel VBA by an external consultancy before being delivered as reports in Tableau. A significant cost-saving target was placed on this project. Charmaine trained herself on SQL and Tableau, migrating files out of the consultancy and onto the company’s own servers, before reconnecting to the visualisation software. This required her to liaise with data developers to model and process the data in Teradata and with report developers to design the outputs. New daily usage reporting was created and redundant reports were decommissioned. The user experience and on-screen branding were enhanced in the process, with exception reporting added to flag rogue data values. After just four months, Charmaine was voted as DASA Ambassador by her colleagues, won a global fintech competition, has featured in Barclaycard’s in-house magazine and a London Evening Standard article on female apprentices.
What did the judges say?
As her own colleagues described her, “awesome!”
