Employee Spotlight: Spearheading Skill Assessments at DataCamp

What was your journey to joining DataCamp?

For me, it all started with a passion for statistics. Being able to see the possibilities that data offered led me to spend seven years at university studying as much statistics as I possibly could. I then joined a data science consultancy here in the UK, so that I could finally get to use it and make an impact.

I started by building tools for others to be able to more easily do data science in R, but it was the education side of my role that I really grew to love. In over six years with the company, I not only got to teach a whole range of data science topics, but I also got to work directly with customers to advise them on the best training programs to help them grow their teams.

I got to know DataCamp through conferences and events that I attended and even got to build a course. When I decided it was time to move on, I knew I wanted to focus more on education but also maintain the data science side—so DataCamp was a perfect fit.

Describe your current team. What do you find most interesting about your role?

As the Head of Skill Assessment Content, I lead the team that builds all of the challenges in our new assessment product, DataCamp Signal. Signal is an adaptive assessment tool that gives learners a bird’s-eye view of their skill level. This means we get to think about questions like “What should a data scientist know about Python programming?” and really consider the best ways to figure out whether people know those things or not.

How has your career grown since joining DataCamp?

I have been at DataCamp for almost a year now, and the biggest area of growth for me, without a doubt, has been in people management. This is my first role as a team lead, and I’ve had the opportunity to develop as a manager and learn how to get the best out of the people I work with.

What are you most excited for in 2020?

Assessment! This is a relatively new area for DataCamp—we launched Signal in September last year, so I am really looking forward to seeing it grow throughout 2020. We will be adding more assessments throughout the year, expanding our existing assessments, and working on even more ways to get our learners to the content that is right for them.

One exciting feature we are experimenting with at the moment is letting learners mark courses in tracks as complete if they have scored well in an assessment. This means you don’t have to repeat content you already know to get to the courses you really want to take.

What do you like best about working for DataCamp?

I love the opportunity to work so closely with people across a whole range of different departments. In the London office, I sit with people from the product and engineering departments as well as the sales and marketing departments. It’s great to hear their thoughts on what we are developing and to be challenged on ideas.

What are your favorite DataCamp cultural values and why?

Seek out diversity of thought. During the development of one of our most recent assessments, we were given feedback by team members from almost every department in the company. It really helped us to think about what we were developing and why, and helped us to recognize our own blind spots as the team that had been working so closely on the product.

What’s something you learned in the last week?

You are less likely to make decisions for emotional reasons in a second language. I am really interested in language learning and just finished reading The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa.

Would you like to join Aimee at DataCamp? We’re currently hiring in New York; London; Leuven, Belgium; and remote locations. Check out our open roles.