ASSISTANT MANAGER | DATA ANALYTICS
Deloitte Southern Africa | Johannesburg
Nontobeko Lekuleni is an Assistant Manager in the Risk Advisory service line within Deloitte. She started as a junior consultant in 2017 in Deloitte’s graduate programme - Data Factory. She was trained as a Chemical Engineer in university, so entering the data analytics environment was new to her. She went through various learnings such as understanding what Data Analytics is, coding in SAS and SQL and understanding how to present. She believes these were the building blocks that led her to her career path. She has since developed expertise in Data Management and this year (2022), she obtained her Certified Data Management Professional certification. She is mostly based in Data Management projects including Regulatory reporting projects, such as POPIA compliance, IFRS 9 and IFRS 17. In these projects the team perform gap assessments, develop process maps and data flows, and provide guidance in terms of data governance, analyse data quality and at times, manage master data or metadata, visualise data, among other things.
What Nontobeko loves about her role is that it is not routine, projects can be short, and you get to explore different areas of Data analytics. She gets to work with very intelligent colleagues, and she is always challenged to improve and work more efficiently to deliver quality deliverables. Working in this role is inspiring - the job keeps her on her toes and pushes her to exceed. She feels that she is always learning. She considers herself an analytical and logical thinker and she like to always understand how things should work and that has developed her process mapping skill. As a young woman in analytics, she never disqualifies herself and always takes opportunities that are presented to her. She would tell young women who want to pursue a career in analytics to “do your best, take advice, even if its harsh, and grow!”. She wants to be a leader who makes a lasting impact.