Consultant Spotlight: Daniel Hill
Digital Futures 
At Digital Futures, we are removing barriers, opening up opportunity and accelerating tech careers.
In this article, we spoke to Daniel Hill, who completed our data analytics training before being deployed as a consultant at one of the UK’s largest insurance companies. Daniel came to our Future Talent Programme off the back of completing a data bootcamp and went on to thrive at our Academy, completely transforming his skillset and going on to start his career in data.
"It wasn't just the training or the possibility of getting a role, but the social messaging was hitting me differently. It felt like there was something different about Digital Futures, something special."
I was born in the UK, but I actually grew up in Spain and I went through the Spanish school system. I was always a good student when I was at school and I had very good technical knowledge – my favourite courses were always physics and technical drawing. That led me to study mechanical engineering at university. When I got to my second and third years at university, I really started to struggle and felt like I needed a change – that led me to take up an opportunity to do a year abroad in Memphis, Tennessee.
In my first year as a full-time student in the US, I landed an internship with Thyssen Krupp, where I worked for eight months. That’s where my passion for solving problems and project management really came from. When I graduated, I secured a permanent role with Thyssen Krupp, but it was 2020, and we all know what happened. I had just joined the company, and it was unfortunately very easy to let me go.
That was a really difficult time for me, and I really struggled to pick myself up after that disappointment. I tried applying to other engineering jobs, but I was hitting the classic barrier that so many people from my generation were experiencing. You graduate, but unless you get a job right away via a prior internship, getting a junior position in engineering requires two to three years of experience. I didn’t have that, and I found it impossible to find a role. I ended up drifting and doing a customer service job to tie me over. It was comfortable but it wasn’t inspiring, and I knew I wanted more.
I saw an advert for a tech skills bootcamp in a train station, which was looking for participants to do a training course sponsored by the Ministry of Education. I decided to give it a chance. The bootcamp was the first time I had really done coding, and it opened a whole new avenue of opportunity for me. It was the first instance where I started to move away from my engineering mindset and into a more technical mindset.
Whilst I was doing the course at the bootcamp, I came across Digital Futures who did a webinar talking about their Future Talent Programme. I’d seen similar organisations to Digital Futures, but their proposition really stood out to me amongst the rest. It wasn’t just the training or the possibility of getting a role at the end, but the social messaging was hitting me differently. It didn’t just feel like another business for profit – there was something different, something special. My experience applying and then being onboarded into the programme proved that my instinct was correct.
When I reflect on my experience in the Academy, I think it was genuinely life changing. Digital Futures helped me to not only enjoy learning again but really gave me a place where I felt like I belonged, and where I could thrive.
The learning approach at Digital Futures is completely different to traditional school or university education. It’s not at all theory based; you don’t have a lecturer teaching you conceptual things. At university, I always found that you were taught theory, and you were then expected to be able to apply it, even though you’d never used it before. With Digital Futures, they do it completely differently. Not only do you get so much passion and knowledge from all of the instructors, but they are also so approachable, giving you the chance to implement your knowledge through practice. Most of the time at the Academy is dedicated to practical matters and exercises and I especially loved the Jupyter notebooks, which allowed you to follow along with an exercise and write it down. That really helped to embed the knowledge.
"My level of knowledge completely transformed over the course of the 12-weeks of data analytics training."
My level of knowledge completely transformed over the course of the 12-weeks of data analytics training. I went from having a good, basic understanding of Python and the logic of the syntax to being able to use accurate, powerful and direct applications of Python. Before Digital Futures, I would have been able to code something, but I could never have delivered a solution with full confidence that it was going to work. The skills I learned at the Digital Futures Academy were a complete game changer.
I’m now a consultant for Digital Futures, working in a data science consulting role at one of the UK’s largest insurance companies. My team provides technologies, different programmes and data analytics expertise to support the front office businesses. The bulk of my role is focused on maintaining the developer environment within the business – this essentially provides the technical expertise to develop and maintain different tools across the business to optimise processes. We’re currently working on building a centralised Python environment, focused on bringing greater cohesion across the business, developing different apps, other coding tools, and tech solutions using automation and Gen AI to help support people in their roles and maximise performance.
I love the challenge in the role and the positive engagement towards different problems and the way that we try to implement the new technologies. We do it in such an exploratory way and are always working to find different ways to bring the technologies to the business as a whole. My team lead reports directly into the Chief Information Officer and so the work we’re doing on building a centralised Python environment will have a major impact on the whole business. I’ve been working with my team lead to clearly demonstrate the capabilities of the technologies we’re developing so that they can be useful for users across the whole company, and so that people feel empowered to use the technology to learn, to innovate and to pioneer.
Being part of Digital Futures feels like I finally found the community I’ve always been looking for. Everyone here is aligned and working towards the same goal – people are excited about technology and committed to making it into their career. It was also incredibly reassuring when first joining that I wasn’t alone – sharing this experience with other people who had found it difficult to start their career and were also taking this step to make it happen through Digital Futures was really powerful. We all worked together, collaborated and grew together to get to this point.
Digital Futures is still providing me with so much support whilst I’m deployed on client site. My Delivery Manager is always checking in, which shows a level of support that I think is lacking in other organisations. They provide me with different technical and professional development resources but are also always there when you just need someone to listen. The team at Digital Futures genuinely care about you and they want you to succeed.
"It was also incredibly reassuring when first joining that I wasn’t alone – sharing this experience with other people who had found it difficult to start their career and were also taking this step to make it happen through Digital Futures was really powerful."
When I look back on this journey it doesn’t seem real, and sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind myself that it is.
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