Women in Big Data Munich hosted another meetup at Google premises on 14 June, 2018. Around ninety attendees enjoyed the occasion in the conference area of Google office space.

The meetup started with an introduction of Women in Big Data by Nahia Orduna, Principal Solution Architect in Vodafone and WiBD Munich Chapter Lead. She explained WiBD vision, mission, and why Munich has many opportunities in Big Data and Digitalization for a variety of job roles and professional backgrounds.

Astrid Neumann, Senior Talent Manager at Mercateo and WiBD Munich Chapter Lead, delivered a keynote on recruiting practices in Germany. At the moment there is a shortage of skilled talent in high-tech sector, but successful job application needs to meet certain criteria. Astrid provided the audience with some insights and advice on how to make their candidate profiles stand out – by illustrating the concept with a metaphor of “how to be a flamingo in a swarm of pigeons”. She gave useful and practical suggestions, sharing her experience as Senior Talent Manager and showing the audience how to position themselves to get the job they want. Her presentation ended with an interactive workshop, where the audience was divided in five groups brainstorming on flipboards about their unique selling points to make sure they shine in a recruitment process.

Last but not least, Markus Rotter, Head of Analytics in Vodafone, and Charlotte Dyckmanns and Irene Dornmair, Data Scientists in Vodafone, explained how Vodafone uses Advanced Analytics. Vodafone network is continuously creating a large amount of data, offering an attractive playground for data scientists to apply advanced analytical methods and algorithms. But being a Data Scientist at Vodafone goes beyond machine learning and statistical analysis on Big Data. The job roles range from data gathering to designing end-to-end processes to cross-functional discussions with a wide variety of teams and implementing real-time software in Python. In this talk, the Vodafone team gave a hands-on example on how we go from insights gained from historic data to triggering real-time action. Most importantly, Vodafone announced that they are recruiting, and multiple participants approached them afterwards to get more information.

As usual, at the end there was some time dedicated to networking. The WiBD Munich team looks forward to continuing to inspire, grow, connect and champion Women in Big Data.

Presentation of Vodafone to download.