Who are you and what do you do for work?

Mikhael Koufos works as a data analyst at Ilmarinen, a private earnings-related pension insurance company. In the video, he talks about what he has studied and what his job involves.

“I studied statistics at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and graduated in 2018. After that, I’ve studied business at the Aalto University School of Business while working.”

Koufos says that data analysts do more than just analyse data – although data analysis is of course a significant part of the job.

“We create a lot of different reports, for example. I’ve also had the opportunity to manage our entire data pipeline. The data for the reports comes from various applications and sources. My work includes creating the definitions for this and ensuring that the data that flows into the tables is accurate and of high quality. This is called data engineering. My focus is especially on customer experience and customer service data and the related reports.”

Koufos says that the best thing about his work is its varied nature.

“I get to put my studies in both statistics and business to good use. My role involves more than just reporting and data analysis, although these are really interesting in themselves. With our business operations team, we also look at data to determine which things we should focus our development efforts on next.

“This is a true vantage position.”