How I Got My Job (And Why I Still Can't Explain It)

I got asked by an intern once how I got into my role.

Honestly I think it’s a bit of magic and luck, I said. You can tell I grew up on Disney.

“But really,” said the intern, “how did you do it? What course should I take?”

I honestly don’t have a straight answer to that.

The Accidental Path

I chose an economics undergraduate because it sounded cool when my uncle told me once about it. I was good at maths and swore up and down I wouldn’t do accounting.

I studied at the University of the Witwatersrand — a Bachelor of Commerce focused on Economics and Risk & Insurance. Wits has a way of making you feel like you can figure out anything, even when you’re staring at a Stata screen wondering what just happened.

Somehow through university I took finance classes, as I thought yes we are going into banking. Hated finance — would go back to accounting over that.

My true love, I guess, was Macro Economics. Oh the graphs and the way you get to watch the world! However I made a promise years ago — no politics.

The Tools Found Me

So back to the being good at maths part. That somewhat translated into Economical Statistics. And that’s when they gave me my first look at tools on a weird application called Stata.

I guess it was first love… maybe true love? When I learnt R and Python and SQL I just wanted to be more in it. But I loved the fun parts of it — the really fancy graphs and not so much the data cleanups.

I learnt how to take Excel from zero to basically coding. Ask me what the limit of text or formula in a cell is one day.

The Master’s Degree

After Wits, I did a Master of Science in Business Analytics at Hult International Business School. I thought I was done with studying. Spoiler: I wasn’t.

I took a data analysis for management course at the London School of Economics because apparently I like collecting education like stamps. I even did a Property Development and Investment course at the University of Cape Town because why not.

The TecEx Chapter

Before Cloudflare, I was a Compliance Specialist at TecEx in Johannesburg. I collaborated with over 100 technology manufacturers to enhance compliance knowledge, managed a Salesforce revamp project, and built a machine learning algorithm that improved customs processing efficiency.

Sounds fancy, right? Mostly it was me staring at spreadsheets at 2am thinking “this could be better.”

The Cloudflare Chapter

Then I got to Cloudflare as a Sales Operations Support Analyst in Lisbon. Before a full quarter in that role, I took over our third party apps. And oh, I thank the days that they saw me and thought “I think she will like that.”

Now I’m a GTM Tool Admin Manager — a job title that is difficult to explain to parents, dates and anyone not in the industry.

So To Answer Your Question, Intern

“Some pixie dust, Not Accounting, a little bit of Econ101, not finance, definitely not politics, Stata (google it — been around before fun coding and academics say it might outlive them), a Master’s in Business Analytics, some compliance work, a machine learning algorithm I built because I was bored, and some people asking me if I wanted to admin some third party tools?”

Anyways, maybe this is my series to answer the question on “How do I get your job one day?”

“The best career paths aren’t planned. They’re built one curious decision at a time.”