National Coding Week is upon us in the UK which aims to give adults the opportunity to learn some coding or digital skills. To spread the word across Vanquis, our Analyst Community and People Development team have joined forces to host events all week, giving colleagues the opportunity to ask questions about coding and share their coding experiences.
"I joined Vanquis as a Junior Recoveries Analyst in Operations after completing a Maths degree almost 5 years ago. I had no experience and didn't even know what coding was! From day 1 I learnt SQL (a coding language that stores and manipulates data) with the help of my team and was given my own projects to start developing my skills.
I found the basic syntax and logic quite straight forward but it took time and practise to be able to code from scratch without google or other people's help -I can't just learn from videos/ being taught. I often got errors and couldn't understand why, but learnt to just break it down into smaller steps –where did it go wrong and what does the error say.
I moved to Existing Customer Management (ECM) in October last year and started to learn SAS (a programming language used to analyse data). I had access to online training which I worked my way through and started to run code that others had written. I found I learnt best by playing around with writing my own code, making mistakes and learning from them.
It can be a bit daunting to look at how much data we have in the bank and what it all does but that is where a good analyst community can help by sharing data dictionaries and best practise. Once you learn one language I think it is generally easier to learn another as the basic approach should be similar and you just learn new syntax and tricks.
I still have a lot to learn and think you can always improve but I really enjoy it and want to try new coding languages in the future."