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How data visualisation can shed light on your career

How data visualisation can shed light on your career

4 min
Posted: 13 August 2018
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Using images and predictive analytics can catapult your travel programme into management’s field of vision potential

Back at work after another travel industry conference and still basking in the glow of the rave reviews your panel session received? But have you returned to an office where you are invisible to senior management and see no way up the career ladder? It may be time to step back and work out how your colleagues might start seeing you less as the travel bean counter and more as one of tomorrow’s movers and shakers. So, what about starting to think, act and communicate like a leader? According to Amy Gallo of the Harvard Business Review, one way to prove your potential is to take on projects and problems that others aren’t willing to tackle or don’t even know exist. Gallo also stresses that your success will be linked to your boss’s success. She quotes Maignan Wilkins who suggests: “You have to execute on your boss’s priorities too. Lean more towards yes than no whenever your boss asks you to help with something new. Find out what keeps your manager up at night and propose solutions to those problems.”[1]

Where can travel take you?

Travel is a business support tool. It is not the central objective of most organisations. Travel managers are often isolated and unlikely to be in direct contact with key decision-makers. Being the only one doing something means most colleagues probably don’t even know what you do. How many in your company think that your job is only about finding suitable flights and hotel rooms or something to complain about if your boss provides a clunky Online Booking Tool? It’s time to set them straight. Travel managers are paid to be experts in controlling travel costs, but you will grab management attention when they discover that you’re doing more than they think and what someone else wouldn’t think to do. Business travel analysis is part of your job but remember that raw data only reports the past. Data visualisation and predictive analytics, however, are about understanding the present and knowing how to act in the future. Take the initiative and use dynamic visuals to provide quickly understandable evidence. Boil all of your travel data into a single powerful story, backed by data. Management will sit up and take notice of your company policy recommendations and see you in a different light.

How do you get there?

You need to highlight your deftness at business travel analysis. Sending Excel sheets attached to a weekly email update may fulfil your obligation to report data but senior management rarely absorbs the implications of a sea of columns and rows of numbers. It’s just like using bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation. The content might be there, but audiences will take more notice of a short video clip. Data visualisation summarises the message that all those numbers are sending and effectively demonstrate patterns. It allows you to see the “where” and, most importantly, identify new possible cause-and-effect relationships. It allows you to easily introduce a visual into your updates and presentations that makes travel and the travel booking patterns of different departments stand out alongside the cost implications. Such a story board just might suggest to your line manager how traveller satisfaction could be improved and corporate costs reduced by introducing some modifications to travel policy. A visual snapshot of what the numbers mean is a way of presenting not only your ability to find savings for your company and personalised solutions for your different travellers but your potential for imaginative problem solving. According to PwC, “The best jobs right now in America include titles like data scientist, data engineer, and business analyst.” They say, “CEOs tell us they're looking for employees who can problem-solve in technology-rich environments and link their work to business value.” Recruitment consultants love to talk about transferable skills. If you want your career to take off, demonstrate that you don’t need to be a data scientist to be effective. Embracing data visualisation and predictive analytics to communicate imaginative business intelligence can propel your career.

[1]https://hbr.org/2013/05/act-like-a-leader-before-you-a

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