Value Driven Data Science: Boost your impact. Earn what you’re worth. Rewrite your career algorithm.

[00:00:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Hello and welcome to Value Driven Data Science, the podcast that helps data scientists transform their technical expertise into tangible business value, career autonomy, and financial reward. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and today I'm joined by Sarah Burnett. Sarah is the co-founder of Dub Dub Data, a consultancy that offers human-centric AI and Tableau solutions.
[00:00:28] She transitioned into independent consulting after navigating redundancy from a senior role at a major bank. She's also the co-host of the podcast, unDubbed. In this episode, we'll explore how to transform unexpected job loss into a launchpad for an even more successful data science career
[00:00:49] so get ready to boost your impact, earn what you're worth, and rewrite your career algorithm. Sarah, welcome to the show.
[00:00:57] Sarah Burnett: Thanks. I'm excited to be here today.
[00:01:00] Dr Genevieve Hayes: There was once a time when data science was still in its infancy and when data science Masters programs were few and far between. When it was possible to walk into a data science role with little more than having completed a machine learning mooc, this was the case when I was hiring the first data scientist for my team at work back in the mid 2010s, where any demonstration of an attempt to learn skills such as Python coding or modeling was enough to secure an interview.
[00:01:32] The demand for data scientists massively outweighed supply, and those with the right skills had their choice of jobs. 10 years later, however, the job market has dramatically changed. The global economy has shifted. The number of data scientists has increased, and businesses have gone from fighting for data science talent to making difficult decisions about their data science teams.
[00:01:58] The data scientists who unexpectedly find themselves out of a job. It can be a truly overwhelming experience. However, unexpected job loss doesn't necessarily mean the end of your career. In fact, it can mean the start of something even better. Sarah, you've recently had firsthand experience in navigating this challenging landscape and have emerged stronger on the other side.
[00:02:23] To begin with, can you start by telling us a bit about your own job loss story?
[00:02:29] Sarah Burnett: Yeah. So Genevieve, I'd like to start with, first of all, discovering when I was made redundant. And I think no matter how much you can prepare for it, and we were, going through a transitional phase where roles were at risk. And interestingly enough, part of my role at the time was crunching some of those numbers.
[00:02:51] So we knew we had. Headcount targets, and we knew where those targets sat within the bands of the organization. And to a point, I knew that there was a number on my head. And so when I was told I was redundant, I wasn't overly surprised. But it is still an uncomfortable time to be in and. In reflection, you can't not think it's you.
[00:03:26] You've been made redundant. And for me, a critical element and turning point was I could see it was a numbers game and I was at a particular level in an executive role in a large global financial institution that was really looking ultimately at a spreadsheet. Making the decisions on whose job was to go.
[00:03:54] And I feel a big piece of the puzzle when you are made redundant is understanding that it is a numbers game and it's not necessarily personal.
[00:04:07] Dr Genevieve Hayes: I've never experienced redundancy myself, but a few years back I was working in a Victorian government role, and as part of the election campaign, the Victorian Premier announced that. My organization was gonna relocate from the Melbourne CBD to Regional Victoria, and although my job did still technically exist to continue in it, I would have to completely relocate my life, which was something I didn't wanna do.
[00:04:37] So I was actually out of town that weekend. I didn't hear the local news, and then I came in on the Monday morning. One of my work colleagues said to me, oh, what did you think of the news? And I'm like, what news? Huh? And he's like, oh we're all moving to Geelong. Excuse me. And I just remember, it felt like my life had just come to an end.
[00:05:01] And it wasn't personal. It was literally something to do with an election campaign, but, I lost my sense of security about the future. I wanted to get outta the situation as soon as possible, and I just wanted to get my old life back again.
[00:05:16] Sarah Burnett: And actually you saying that reminded me of back, I lived in London for seven years. And I remember walking into an organization one day and the room was empty. This is a big trading floor at a investment bank in London. And I looked around and was like, where is everybody? And someone said to me, haven't you heard the news?
[00:05:40] We've merged. We've merged with another financial institution that, funnily enough, a lot of the people at this organization had moved from to be there to get away from that, and there was so much uncertainty. And I was contracting at the time and, didn't have a family, I didn't have commitments.
[00:06:03] Everything was kind of quite transitional for me and it didn't impact me as it did kind of fast forward 20 odd years into the future. But I do remember thinking, oh, these kind of things can just happen and have such a big impact.
[00:06:20] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah, it feels like the flaws just fallen out from under you and you go from being happy to being what just happened.
[00:06:28] Sarah Burnett: Yes. And I think for me it was an interesting one because my role had evolved into something that I wasn't particularly proud of. So that initial conversation with my line manager was a little bit of a sense of relief. It was. There's things that I don't have to do anymore that I don't like doing, and that's the first wave of emotion that came over me.
[00:06:55] And I remember throughout the process, and it was a process thinking, hold onto that thought because there's a lot of change coming for me and my situation was I was living in Singapore on a employment pass and without that job I no longer had an employment pass. So it meant find another role or go home.
[00:07:21] And additional to that first wave of emotion came over and then the second wave was. Oh my gosh. I've got school fees to pay. I've just resigned a two year rental agreement in a foreign country. All these financial pressures came my way and luckily the organization I was with.
[00:07:43] Is very fair with its redundancy package. It is governed by UK law, so there are a lot of benefits there that are not necessarily what everyone gets with redundancy and the process was very fair. And when I said I needed more time to process and to unpack everything, I was ultimately given more time.
[00:08:11] So I was very lucky in that respect. And then what happened is I actually got time to process what my next steps were going to be, which again, very fortunate to do. At first, I was like, oh, I'm just gonna go and find another role, whether that be internal or for another large organization. And again, because I had the time to go through it and as I went through it, I was noticing that this wasn't the best fit for me.
[00:08:47] And just getting another role with potentially the same things that I no longer liked was just going to be replacing one role for another role, and throughout that process I actually decided to relocate back to New Zealand.
[00:09:06] Dr Genevieve Hayes: When I had that experience where my job got moved to Geelong, all I wanted to do was just find a new job right away. And I literally got a job with exactly the same job title as the job that I was leaving. I just had to get that new job and the job after that, I did something different.
[00:09:26] But I can understand how if you don't have the time to think things through, that can be your initial first reaction. How do I restore the situation that I've just lost?
[00:09:36] Sarah Burnett: Yes. Very much so. It's like, okay, just solve it. Let's solve this problem with, round hole, round peg.
[00:09:45] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah. It has to be exactly the same thing. Did you send out your resume or did you just pause and decide to go in a different direction before you got to that point? I.
[00:09:55] Sarah Burnett: Yeah. Great question. I did just have a talk with a couple of people. It was tough though because I wasn't allowed to talk about my redundancy to my team and Singapore Corporate Finance as a small space, so I had to be very careful with those that I was talking about and the recruiters that I was talking to, and it was very much, I've got this particular thing, let's have a chat about it.
[00:10:24] So I didn't go out and update my CV straight away. Internally as well. There's obviously a process where they would like to relocate you within the organization, so there's channels to look at there. And I did look at some roles early on. But like I said, pretty quickly I realized that I didn't wanna just replace what I had with something the same.
[00:10:51] Dr Genevieve Hayes: When you came to that realization, did you also come at that same time to the realization that. You wanted to go down the consultancy path, or was it just traditional employment's not for you, and you wanted to explore what other possibilities existed out there?
[00:11:10] Sarah Burnett: It was a few more steps than that, to be honest. And I say that because. At first, I thought my change was going to be moving away from global corporations and coming back to New Zealand and working for a smaller organization. So even when I returned back, I thought to myself, I'm gonna take some time.
[00:11:30] I'm gonna settle my son at school in the February, march. I'm gonna start networking. April, I'll start looking at roles and may I'll magically get a job and off I'll go. So it wasn't even. I was gonna do it. I wasn't even thinking about entrepreneurialship by this stage. But again, when I got into that mindset and started looking at roles here in New Zealand, I started thinking once again, well, it may be a smaller scale.
[00:12:00] But it's still another corporate role in a corporate organization. When I posted up on LinkedIn that I had relocated, I did get reached out to by a lot of different industries here, which I liked because one thing I knew is that I didn't wanna go back into finance. I'd been in the industry for 20 years.
[00:12:22] And I wanted something different. So there was some other industries that reached out. There were some consultancies that reached out as well. So I went through the interviews, but there just wasn't something grabbing me. And I think again, it felt like the universe was saying, Hey Sarah, you need to do something different here.
[00:12:42] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So what made you decide the consultancy was the way for you?
[00:12:46] Sarah Burnett: Yeah, great question. And my business partner's name is Fiona Crocker, and I was talking to her about my process and redundancy and so forth, and in I think June of last year, she also got landed with a redundancy. We just started talking and for years we'd been talking about how could we do this differently?
[00:13:13] What's things that we would do if we were running our own organization? And when her role got made redundant, she didn't want to jump back into another role either. She wanted to take the time and I think she looked to me because I was ahead of the curve on the process that she was about to go through. And we just started talking. And one day she said, John, her now husband, I think you and Sarah should go into business together. And we were like, oh, why don't we try that? And, we spoke about it for a good number of months and what that would look like and what we would do and, and so forth.
[00:13:55] And so in the November we launched dub dub data.
[00:13:59] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So why? Data consultancy.
[00:14:01] Sarah Burnett: Yeah, I think it was our strengths and we did go through some transitions on what we wanted to do, and a big part of our ethos is to bring the right people together. So while we are a data consultancy, we've niched down really into being a Tableau data consultancy. Leveraging, obviously AI and our experience in both the community and working in strategic data roles, and our mission statement is helping organizations unlock value from data.
[00:14:40] What we want to do is, in our ethos, is not build a huge, big organization. Our goal is not to look like EY in 10 years time. It's actually to bring the right people in at the right time to solve the right problem. And initially we went down a building, a community, and a marketplace for data professionals to come together.
[00:15:03] And we loved the idea and. I feel if we'd done it five years ago, it would've been a massive opportunity. But as we grew into it, we realized the complexities and the challenges of building a B2B business, and we had to take a step back and think and really niche down into our own strengths. And we are not saying that building a community and marketplace is off the table.
[00:15:35] But it is not the big focus for now. So we've looked at niching down into the tableau space because we see a big demand for the Salesforce Tableau journey. And having been inside big organizations, the power of having the right people to work alongside to be successful.
[00:16:01] Dr Genevieve Hayes: What I think is really interesting with what you just said there was how you said that you started with that idea of creating a marketplace and then you decided that wasn't the right path. Because the timing was wrong and it presented challenges that you hadn't anticipated, and so therefore you went in a different direction.
[00:16:23] When I've spoken to people who've considered taking a entrepreneurial journey, one of the things that I find causes them not to go down that path is that they're not sure about the direction they wanna take, and they're worried about making mistakes. And I think what you've said is. Yeah your first decision wasn't the right decision for you, but that didn't mean that you needed to just give up on this idea of dub dub data.
[00:16:50] You just pivoted into a different direction and tried something different. Is there any other lessons that you learned from that?
[00:16:58] Sarah Burnett: Yeah, I think it's really key to be able to feel comfortable enough to take risks and to fail. So we say not now. We don't say not never. So some of the strategies that we still take are, we do know a lot of people in the community and when we have projects that we are working on, we know the two of us can't do it on our own.
[00:17:22] So we still leverage our community and in a way we are kind of building that marketplace still. We're just starting at a much smaller scale.
[00:17:33] Dr Genevieve Hayes: That's good. And that's what they recommend. Start small, monopolize a very small niche, and then grow from there.
[00:17:42] Sarah Burnett: Yeah. And I think just to your point as well, it's really about just not being afraid to start something.
[00:17:50] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah, I would agree with that. That's the approach I've taken to my own business. Given your experiences to date, would you recommend a non-traditional path such as entrepreneurship and independent consulting to other data scientists in a similar position to your own?
[00:18:06] Sarah Burnett: Yeah, in some ways, I'd wish I'd done it sooner or at least had a side hustle. I could potentially build up. And I feel with AI as it stands today, it's just getting better and easier to be a one or two person show leaning into the support that AI can give you. If I think about having set this up 10 years ago, the army of people that we would've needed around us.
[00:18:37] Is much bigger than what we can do today with our be It over enthusiastic interns, which I like to sometimes refer to as chat, PT and Claude,
[00:18:50] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yep.
[00:18:51] Sarah Burnett: but you can train them and get them to support you and to get a lot out of them.
[00:18:58] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Well, there are so many things that I do in my own business through various software tools, be it clawed or even just. These podcasts, we are doing this podcast on two different sides of the Tasman Sea. And, 10, 20 years ago that would not be possible. We would have to be together in the same room.
[00:19:21] Sarah Burnett: Exactly.
[00:19:22] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So technology makes a lot of things possible at an affordable rate.
[00:19:27] Sarah Burnett: Yes, and the cost of, of paying for chat, GPT, Claude and other AI tools compared to hiring an administrator is you know, there's a low cost point to entry.
[00:19:41] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah. I think another point that you made earlier on was how you wish that you'd started this earlier, or at the very least, as a side hustle. I would agree with that. 'cause will win that job. Lost all of its staff in the Victorian government.
[00:19:59] It would've been nice to have the security of having something on the side. And I find side hustles present a safety net. So you've always got something there. And I understand that entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, but I think at the very least, if you are treating your career as though you are running a solo business, then you're a lot better placed if something unexpected like this does happen.
[00:20:27] Sarah Burnett: Yeah, you're kind of hedging your bets, right? And I feel sometimes in traditional roles, you may not be learning the new tools as much as you would like to, and that's when I think it becomes important to, really. Build your own career and find things that you're passionate about and get involved in those outside of your role.
[00:20:52] It's not your company that you work for or your manager's responsibility to make sure that you are going to be relevant in your role forever. It's yours.
[00:21:06] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Well, the difficult thing to realize is we would all love to have an employer who loves us and nurtures us and. Wants the best for us so that we can all live out our highest potential. That would be great. I really wish that for all of our listeners, but at the end of the day, people are called human resources for a reason.
[00:21:28] They are resources that a company is bringing in to get whatever they want done. And you don't have to like the system, but you have to learn a way to work. Within or around that system.
[00:21:43] Sarah Burnett: Agreed. And years ago when I first came across Tableau. I was in a position where I needed to know a lot more about the tool for the safety of my team because I was basically saying, yes, this tool can do this and go off and let's do a full scale project on it. And I found quite quickly on that.
[00:22:03] I didn't know because I was thinking about a tool that I had worked with and I didn't know what it could do and what it couldn't do. And I actually took on, on my own to do a community-based project, which was. Tableau makeover Monday. And so every week for 52 weeks for 2018, I did a social project, which was taking a old visualization and rebuilding it in Tableau.
[00:22:31] I had my old MacBook and it had about an hour and a half of battery power in it. And so on a Monday night, I would sit down and I would. Crank out visualization and sometimes they were horrible and sometimes they were okay. But over that 52 weeks, I started to learn. Tableau. And as I evolved, I became, better equipped at throwing my team less under the bus and kind of into the, the right project with the right timelines and so forth.
[00:23:02] And that was a big piece for me around getting involved in external communities and that really did a lot for my career.
[00:23:12] Dr Genevieve Hayes: Yeah, that's what I find. It's the things that you take the initiative of that. Turbocharge your career, not whatever it is that your employer has mapped out for you often.
[00:23:24] Sarah Burnett: Correct.
[00:23:25] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So it's now been more than 18 months since you started dub dub data or since you moved back to New Zealand.
[00:23:32] Looking back, how do you view that experience now?
[00:23:36] Sarah Burnett: It is interesting because some days I'm like, oh my gosh, look at everything we've achieved in that time. And other days I'm thinking, oh, but I wanna do so much more. And. If I do take a step back and think about all the learnings, because up until that point, I'd always been in an organization that had a legal department, an HR department.
[00:24:03] You know, I always had people working for me that could do everything. And now we are a two person business. We do have administration support and like I said, we can pull in others as we need them, but it's such a huge, yet rewarding learning curve.
[00:24:25] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So for listeners who've also recently lost their jobs, what's one thing that they can do tomorrow to start building their career into something even better than it was before?
[00:24:36] Sarah Burnett: I think a lot of it is around finding your unique value. It's almost like an internal workshop with yourself and you will come up with twists and turns and so forth. And I think, again, leaning on AI to help you have those conversations with chat GPT or, really dig deep, listen to different podcasts around finding your value, but find something that you are passionate about that can be unique to you.
[00:25:06] And start talking and networking and I think as well, leveraging tools like LinkedIn and starting to have those conversations openly. Around your unique value and canvas. You know, do polls, do articles, go on the odd rant if that's, how passionate you feel about it. But really take the opportunity to look at something like redundancy as not just a negative, I've gotta go and find a new role, but maybe this is a opportunity for me to take a step back and look at it slightly differently.
[00:25:44] Dr Genevieve Hayes: So for listeners who wanna get in contact with you, Sarah, what can they do?
[00:25:48] Sarah Burnett: So I'm very active on LinkedIn, so do reach out to me. So you'll find me Sarah Burnett on LinkedIn.
[00:25:58] Dr Genevieve Hayes: And there you have it. Another value packed episode to help turn your data skills into serious clout, cash, and career freedom. If you enjoyed this episode, why not make it a double next week? Catch Sarah's value boost a 10 minute episode where she shares one powerful tip for getting real results real fast.
[00:26:19] Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. Thanks for joining me today, Sarah,
[00:26:24] Sarah Burnett: Thanks, Genevieve. It's been a really interesting conversation.
[00:26:28] Dr Genevieve Hayes: and for those in the audience, thanks for listening. I'm Dr. Genevieve Hayes, and this has been Value Driven Data Science.