Then six months after that, Zuckerman’s team was moved to the parent company and started building visualization tools for companies in the firm’s portfolio, with a focus on operations and investment management.

Although he didn’t gravitate toward technology early on, Zuckerman was intrigued about how different tools work together. “My father brought me along to see his projects and even asked me to help him with some of his jobs,” he says. “This really showed me how different technologies can work in unison within an integration tool.”

And the experience at the private equity firm reinforced the idea that technology can play a vital role in enhancing processes. “I watched the business go from being operationally inefficient to a well-oiled machine with an extensive automated reporting deck,” Zuckerman says. “I saw the ability technology can have and the ways software and systems can be used to better run businesses.”

In November 2019, Zuckerman left the firm to work as an analyst at FM Capital, a boutique real estate investment firm. He left that position after just six months, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, and moved on to his current position at ServiceSource.

As a senior BI analyst at the company Zuckerman is working to convert a reporting technology stack from Excel to Power BI. Since he joined ServiceNow in June 2020 he has been focused on setting up reliable extract, transform, load (ETL), the procedure of copying data from one or more sources into a destination system that represents the data differently from the sources or in a different context.

“The issue is that because we are a third-party servicer, we are not the owners of the data, so there is some creativity that comes into play ensuring data quality,” Zuckerman says. “In my experiences, seeing the business from a before-and-after [scenario] made me realize how much this technology can help a business” in terms of bottom-line success.

“Moving to the parent company at my first job,” Zuckerman says. “Our team had done such a great job streamlining and automating processes for the consumer finance businesses that the parent company tasked us to implement the same deck across their portfolios. It was gratifying to see the appreciation the parent company had for our work. Many times it’s hard for more corporate firms to invest in business intelligence, and I remember thinking how useful BI would be.”

At every stage of his career thus far Zuckerman has had to learn new skills. “I went from Excel reporting to SQL to emailing out of SAS to SAS VA to Power BI and Tableau,” he says. “While I haven’t needed any certifications to [be proficient] in these tools, I spent a lot of time ensuring I had a deep enough understanding to be considered a resource.”

“I enjoy the use of concrete logic in the expression of thought,” Zuckerman says. “I think the two figures that shaped my views are [financial historian and economist] Peter Bernstein and [investor and business tycoon] Warren Buffet. Their use of statistics to shape opinion is something I admire, especially during times of misinformation.”

“You never know where an opportunity will take you,” Zuckerman says. “There is a good deal of creativity that’s needed” to be an effective BI analyst. “In most cases, the data isn’t given to you on a silver platter, and there is some bending required to ensure accurate and effective reporting,” he says. “That’s where Python, SQL, R, and other languages come into play.”

“Right now I am trying to automate reporting and working with the company we service to have greater access to the data,” Zuckerman says. “For the future, my goal is to become a wealth of knowledge that can translate into creatively and effectively implementing BI solutions across various business use cases. There is so much BI can accomplish, and I’m excited to be in this field now.”

“Ask questions on how things work,” Zuckerman says. “By doing that, you’ll have a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of different systems, and [it] will force you to use creativity to solve problems that arise. If you’re looking to get into this space, then start by asking questions on devices and apps you use. Technology is so prevalent in our lives that we can use our daily interactions as steppingstones to learning more about technological capabilities.”

In addition, and on a more granular level, Zuckerman recommends that aspiring business intelligence analysts learn SQL and Python. “They’re the backbone languages that most companies look for in candidates,” he says.