Last month I had an amazing opportunity to sit down with Michelle Govindsamy.
Michelle has an honor in finance and professional training with Deloitte. She has 15+ years of experience working with large and mid-tier organizations, including Barclays. She is passionate about harnessing the power of data and analytics to help business decision-making and drive profitability.
Michelle has had an interesting career trajectory, starting from working in the Big4 as an intern in South Africa to recently moving to the UK as a Management Consultant. She has worked across 5+ different FP&A, Finance Business partner and management consultant roles across various organizations.
Here are some of the questions we asked Michelle:
Asif: Is data analytics necessary for finance or FP&A professionals? Is it something they need to spend their time on or is it a good to have skill?
Michelle: Yeah. So the answer to that is “Yes”, and I don’t even think it’s a biased view, it’s the truth. Understanding finance is not enough at all. That’s just your background knowledge. That’s the specialty you bring in, such as your financial modeling skills. Understanding the data environment of your organization is critical not just FP&A but throughout finance, whether you’re a finance business partner, whether you’re a controller, even if you’re doing more compliance activities and regulatory returns, there is so much data.
Asif: Are you expected to learn a programming language (for example SQL) or are you just expected to understand the tool and be able to just run the query? So one is going deep into the programming language and the other is just knowing how to run the tool and taking help of a data scientist in your team.What do you suggest?
Michelle: There are so many programming languages out there, and on SQL particularly, it depends on your organization and the type of work that you’re going to be doing and how the data is kept and managed within your organization. SQL is more a tool or a language to access information from big tables and systems. So there’s a lot of thought that SQL is the language that everyone should learn. I don’t think we can ever think that we will be an expert the way someone who lives and breathes any of these languages are. And that’s okay, we don’t need to be that.
There are developers and that’s why we have these really smart developers in the roles they have. The importance is understanding that, okay, I want to run SQL. What does that mean? That means, like any other application, you need to have SQL on your computer. That means someone needs to give you a script to run it and you kind of need to know the syntax, but you don’t need to write code from scratch. You don’t want to become a developer. They live and breathe this stuff, and they’re there to help you, but you need to speak their language. So you need to know a little about what you’re asking them for and what their world looks like. Especially in FP&A you’re going to be working with, there’s going to be, FP&A will move towards being extremely multidisciplinary. So you need to be able to speak to the data scientist and not in accounting, you need to speak to them in their language.
Asif: If I had to summarize in one or two sentences, I would say you need not become an expert in data science or any of the programming languages. But if you are using that program or tool in your role. You should understand at least the basics so that you are able to intelligently have conversations with people who are experts in those areas. So you should be able to understand the basics of statistics, understand the basics of whatever programming languages your data scientist is using to get you the data that you want. And your partners who are data scientists or people who you are working with will also appreciate that you’re speaking the language.
Asif: What do you do to keep yourself upgraded for Continuous Learning?
Michelle: For me, the biggest part of my learning journey was realizing my learning style and how best I learned. I learn by doing. I have to be an active participant in my learning, so it has to be a problem I’m dealing with right now, and then saying, what is this thing I want to learn about?
Number two is LinkedIn. And because I’m that sort of learner where I learn by doing when I’m learning something, I’m posting about it on LinkedIn. I’m reflecting on what I thought and how it connects to finance, if people who are in finance will find it interesting. So that is one of the reasons I post on LinkedIn: to share my learning, to remember and contextualize it for myself.
And the last point on learning is we’re in this information age. It’s not about whether something exists to answer your question. It exists, right? You need to articulate what is that problem I am having. And then you go out there and there will be an answer. But you need to define what is the problem? The answer is out there. You need to develop the right question.
Final remarks:
Michelle: If you follow Asif and if you’re interested in FP&A, as a finance professional, I think you’re on the right journey. FP&A, finance business partnering are such exciting spaces to be in. It’s the best of all our worlds. And we want the profession to thrive into the future, and we want to become a future fit profession with a focus on technology, data science, and bring our accounting and finance background to that.
To follow Michelle here on LinkedIn, here is the link
To learn more about Data Science and FP&A you can watch the entire conversation here on YouTube.