Describe your career to date 

It would be fair to say that my route to a career in data has been less than direct. Just out of my teens, and having decided that continuing a degree in economics was not the route for me, I found myself on a very different path from the one I had always imagined (however vaguely). Not keen on the idea of an office job, I landed myself a role in betting shop management, having never placed a wager in my life. It was a numbers and customer focused role and suited me well, although it came as a surprise to many who knew me. What was supposed to be a stop gap turned into the start of an almost two decades long, enjoyable and unquestionably educational, stint in the gambling industry. 

While moving through varied roles in operations, compliance, finance, analytics and BI, I spent many of my evenings attending to my, hitherto rather neglected, further education, undertaking a degree in maths and statistics and then becoming a CIMA qualified accountant. While I enjoyed all my roles, it was when using data to tackle complex, and often previously unanswerable, business problems, that I enjoyed and accomplished most in my work.  

Since (finally) leaving the gambling industry in 2021, I have been lucky to find a new home at Pret, where the people are talented and lovely, no two days are the same and data is a major strategic focus. We are busy building our data capabilities, and more importantly our team, and have big ambitions for the coming years.