James Lewis

What is your role at Ricardo? 

Ricardo's clients produce a large quantity of data. It's my job to try and extract useful insights and patterns from this data to assist clients. 

What does your average day at Ricardo look like?

Most days consist of 2 main activities, stakeholder engagement and development of solutions.

The stakeholder engagement is often a process of translating between business and technical language so the consultants within Ricardo can understand both the methodology that we have used, and the results gained. This process is almost always iterative, as early data insights can often be the first step to uncovering larger patterns in data.

The development of solutions consists of many parts from exploring datasets to implementing machine learning algorithms. These stages consist of mostly independent work followed by team meetings to decide how to proceed. 

What do you look forward to at work?

Every project offers a new window into a different area of environmental science. As a Data Scientist by trade this is exciting to learn how key aspects of everyday life work, and then being able to use my skills to develop a solution to these problems. 

What do you find most rewarding at work? / Are you proud to work at Ricardo? 

Working at Ricardo gives me the opportunity to work with real world datasets not available publicly and create solutions from this data that has tangible benefit to the world. I am proud to work for Ricardo and be a part of its long and decorated journey. 

What was you or your team's latest achievement and how was it celebrated?

Every month each team has an opportunity to nominate co-workers for a colleague recognition reward, where the person is celebrated in front of their peers for the fantastic job that they are doing. 

How have you developed your career at Ricardo? 

I joined Ricardo as a Computer Science graduate from the University of Bath as a Junior Data Scientist. I was given many opportunities to progress, taking on more and more responsibility. I have since been promoted to a Data Scientist and still am given more opportunity to progress. 

What opportunities do you have at Ricardo to share your knowledge or expertise? 

When I or another member of the Data Science team comes across something new or innovative that may be of use, we often hold knowledge sharing sessions where we can demonstrate the new technology and why it will be useful to the team going forward.