Hiya! I am Izzy, a Business Analyst Intern part of the Performance Enablement team within Cisco IT. If you’d like to find out more about my role, my daily work life and Cisco, you have clicked on the right blog!
At present, I am a Mathematics Student at the University of Exeter completing my Placement Year at Cisco. I work in Performance Enablement which is responsible for the defining and tracking of Performance Measures, by collecting data to measure what matters in the operation of IT and visualising this to help leaders make decisions using agile methodology.
What I do on a day-to-day basis is very hard to explain as not everyday is the same! My team’s priorities change and (as an intern) I have chances to work with many different teams – from this, I will attempt to pluck out what a “regular” day might look like for me.
Morning
Like everyone else, I get up and ready for the day – if I am going to the office, I will get up earlier to catch my train but I always start my working day by 9:30AM.
The first thing I do is check my WebEx messages and email to respond to any communications when I was offline – I work with people all around the globe from the Netherlands to the USA, so I will sometimes have messages sent to me when I was asleep! As a Business Analyst, lots of my messages are about dashboards I am involved in designing or Service Requests which are generally questions about data within these dashboards. I also receive communications about my Track.
Tracks are part of Cisco’s Early in Career scheme, which encourages Interns and Grads to get together to organise events – I signed up for the I am IT track and our objective is to teach, learn and support culture within IT. One event that supported this objective was Virtual Insights where we hosted multiple sessions to A-Level students about different IT roles and intern/graduate schemes within Cisco.
Picture of the I am IT Virtual Insight’s presentation!
After responding to all my communications, I check my organisation tools (planner and Team Space) to see what on my list has priority. These tasks are updated by me every week after team meetings to discuss what everyone needs to do. More specifically, my job is to assist the team with metric defining, data visualisation, data handling and general organisation in preparation for Cisco CIO and Senior Leadership reviews – so, my tasks will generally be data cleaning and refreshes or editing dashboards for any updates that have been requested.
Midday
I don’t have a set lunch or plan for what I do (again everyday is different)! However, I frequently go out for a run or walk for some fresh air – I live near a part of the Downs Link, so I often explore different routes whilst listening to an audiobook.
Picture of a snowy day when I went for a midday walk!
Afternoon
Everyday, I will go through and refresh data for dashboards – this involves using EXCEL to clean information for our use to ensure that when dashboards automatically refresh, they do so without any problems. Data Engineers are tasked with making this whole process automated, but when we deal with new data sources it can take some time for solutions to be set up, so currently I am charged with making sure that these manual refreshes are done correctly!
As I said, I collaborate with different people all around the globe but I work with a lot of people from the USA, as that is where the home office is – this means that a lot of my meetings take place in the afternoon. It’s always interesting to chat with everyone at Cisco and with these opportunities to network, I get to learn about different experiences and expertise! I am a very practical learner and being able to ask questions directly when we are working on projects helps me understand everything a lot more.
One thing I was absolutely surprised about when I started working at Cisco is that they see me as an employee who adds real value to the team, not just an “intern”. Immediately when I started, I was in meetings with lots of people to introduce myself and learn about what other people do which was such a big help to my learning, as I could then approach different people with different questions from “what does this acronym mean?” to “how do I support people with getting Power BI licenses to request workspaces?”. There is a huge sense of community as I have always been able to message people and have chats.
Picture of my team’s fun Christmas themed meeting before we closed down for the holidays!
Evening
By 5:30PM, I have finished my workday and I have the time to pursue my own interests from relaxed reading or travelling for the weekend!
Overall, my days are never the same and I have the opportunity to learn something new daily! The prospect of having everyday never be the same was very daunting as I didn’t know what to expect, but by being in the Cisco Community I have always felt supported in my career journey as I am continuously given the chance to work on new projects to learn from and to contribute real value to.
Keen to find out more about life at Cisco? Head over to their profile to explore!