As Pandemic continued in 2021 we gained more experience in communicating digital only, learning in digital classes and even execute ideation workshop digital first. We had to prepare for integrating new colleagues which only met us in Skype-Calls and to build partnership with companies in Teams-calls. But in late summer I had the chance to start my Customer Experience Certification face-to-face with my fellow colleagues in person. This year I set my goals to improve my scripting skills in Python, SQL, SAS and R. I wanted to dive deeper into Linux and Git. I was planning to deepen my talk-to-the-customer-first-attitude with an in-depth certification in CEM. In this blog post I want to give a short introduction on platforms, learning paths and practices I used in 2021 to learn, improve my skills, discover new areas and achieve certifications. In June I was very happy to be invited as speaker to European Forum and to present the Suva’s machine learning approaches on advancing accident insurance in a european context. In March I was invited to present my approaches to market research data analysis with R to Lucerne R user group.

Title Image by: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

sql Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Python

To develop, my team and I worked ourselves deeper into spacy library for Industrial-Strength Natural Language Processing. We want to engineer text-based features to improve productive machine learning pipelines and to develop experimental use cases. Additionally I applied spacy functions on my news processing project. At this point I collected over 24 months of news headlines, expanded from srf.ch only to tagesanzeiger.ch and tagesschau.de to compare topics inner swiss and with a leading german news website. This year datacamp.com offered free access to it’s platform and I used my time to complete courses on statistical thinking, network analysis and efficient code writing with Python. Eight courses took me some time but I deepend my knowledge in Python this year.

sas Photo by sas.com

SAS

In order to position SAS Viya with SAS Studio and SAS Visual Analytics as number one platform for internal dashboarding and self-service-business-intelligence there were somne things to explore and learn. I had to explore many things on the SAS server, engage with SAS experts, document some lines of text, code and how-tos, do some lobbying with hands-on workshops to convince my fellow colleagues to use the platform. In 2021 we built many analytics-applications with SAS Viya and strive to provide the far-reaching change process of 2022 with valuable insights. I worked through some fundamentals with SAS Insitute publication ‘SAS Visual Analytics for SAS Viya’ and figured out some equivalents to standard Tableau-functions with SAS Visual Analytics.

R

R

In 2021 I gave an introduction to my work with R in market research to Lucerne R user group. I presented my automatic pipeline from data collection to key driver analysis. To illustrate banner table automation I gave an introduction to expss package. R is - besides Python and SAS - the third language for analytics and reporting pipelines. Therefore many packages had to be worked through, my favorites I introduced in this blog post.

Scrum Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Scrum Product Owner and Customer Experience Certifications

As a Product Owner for Suva’s Machine Learning applications in claims management I constantly improve my abilities to develop Scrum in our data science team. I achieved the certification ‘Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO I)’ and learned much about it in a professional training by zuehlke academy. In order to think customer first I completed a Customer Experience Management workshop series with many practicle applications stuffed with a broad theoretical background. In 2022 a certification from Lucerne University will help me to start my journey into CEM in the context of machine learning and analyticys applications.

Conclusion

This year was a blast when it came to learn new stuff and deepen my knowledge in coding and Scrum. I read a lot about design thinking and try to use different tools whenever the opportunity arives. 2022 I will continue the coding journey with focus on mlops, natural language processing and overall profound python skills.

Thank you, and a happy new year everyone!