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techUK's 'Big Data Hero' campaign highlights Big Data leaders in the UK as part of our work to address the Big Data skills gap.

techUK's May Big Data Hero

techUK's 'Big Data Hero' campaign continues to champion Big Data leaders in the UK that are working hard to ensure the UK can fully realise the benefits of Big Data and Data Analytics.

techUK's campaign highlights the people that are making a difference and asking them what made them choose this career, how they got there, what their typical day involves and what they most enjoy about their work. We will also be enquiring about the future of the industry and what advice they would give to people considering a career in Big Data and Data Analytics, in light of the current Big Data skills gap in the UK.

This campaign will feed into the work of techUK's Big Data Skills Working Group, which will be looking at ways to reduce the Big Data skills gap.

A new techUK 'Big Data Hero' will be chosen every month, so if you would like to nominate a friend or colleague to be the next 'Big Data Hero' please drop Jeremy Lilley a line with a bit of information about them!

May's Big Data Hero - Neil Mackin, Analytics Director, Capita 

Congratulations to May's techUK 'Big Data Hero' - Neil Mackin, Analytics Director, Capita.

Read on for a little taster and find the full interview below.

What is your current role and what are your responsibilities?

I help Capita pursue new business opportunities by contributing expertise around data and analytics to help understand risk and demand on services to be delivered as well as architecting how data analytics can be deployed as part of our service delivery for our largest contracts (which may exceed £100m in value)

What do you think the future holds for Big Data?

I think the hype around big data can be very unhelpful as it focuses attention on the technology rather than the business problems that we’re addresses and can detract from delivering real benefits.

What needs to be done to inspire people to pursue careers in big data?

More needs to be done within education to highlight the opportunities in big data. Sadly only a couple of years ago my teenage daughter was asked by teachers at school what career she wanted to pursue and they were ignorant of the career option when she answered that she’d like to be a “data scientist”.

Neil gave more detailed answers to these and other questions which you can read by clicking below.

Neil Mackin Big Data Hero (pdf)