For 7.5 years, Continuum has played an essential role within the Digital Jersey community, revolutionising data processes for businesses. In this Member Spotlight, we speak to Senior Data Consultant, Ben Banim to delve into what it’s really like to work for Continuum, how he got into filming YouTube videos and what the Continuum team get up to outside the world of data.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role
I consider myself to be upbeat, vibrant, and energetic – some may say a little wacky too!
I love working with others to help them reach their full potential because seeing you win is a win for me too. I’m at my best in front of a room delivering a pitch, speaking at an event, or even running DJ Academy courses. There’s something quite magical about holding the attention of a room and raising the energy up so that everyone can learn something new, but most importantly, have fun doing so! I’m a massive data nerd at heart and thrive at solving and building data analytics and automation solutions for my clients.
My role is really centred around empowering others to do this work for themselves, rather than to build it for them. This allows my clients to be self-sufficient in developing their own solutions and getting their own wins. Outside of work, I enjoy adrenaline-fuelled thrills on my beloved motorbike (on the race track of course…), pumping up the tempo in the gym, or finding my place of Zen in a relaxing meditation practice. Excellent physical, mental, and spiritual health is of utmost importance to me and this allows me to perform at my very best in order to deliver the most valuable service I can to both my clients at work and loved ones outside of work.
What do you like most about being a member?
Meeting lots of other lovely DJ members, making connections, and collaborating on fun new opportunities together. Also having access to the Digital Jersey team, who are especially fun to work with, they’ve been big supporters of myself and Continuum, which I’m deeply grateful for. From featuring on podcasts, the digital careers brochure, helping with our recruitment effort, running DJ Academy courses, joining them at the Jersey Skill Show, helping me find a digital careers mentor, and attending events like DJ Ambassadors meetings and Chamber of Commerce lunches with the DJ team!
What do the Continuum team do outside of work?
The Continuum team are simply lovely people. As well as being experts in what they do, they’re also down-to-earth, genuine, and kind-hearted individuals. I really do enjoy spending downtime with the team whenever the opportunity arises. We routinely head out and do activities together, such as going bowling, playing mini-golf, or simply heading down to the pub for a cold pint. I believe it’s so important to spend time together outside of work to galvanise the team and boost morale – people really do underestimate the value this can bring!
Our latest recruit, Andy Delaney, knows the power that this holds, and he has brought his glowing positivity to champion these out-of-work meetups – what a great guy.
What exciting projects or tasks have you/your team been working on recently, or what do you have coming up in 2023? Have you collaborated with any other Digital Jersey Members?
We’re about to kick off our fifth round of Alteryx courses in the DJ Academy which I’m super excited about. This is such a great platform to allow more people across Jersey to get CODE FREE data literacy and analytics skills, which are dearly needed in today’s modern workforce and shall only become more and more necessary moving forward to the future. There’s a big need to skill our island up with the best digital skills and tools to succeed and I’m privileged to be able to play a role in that development.
Our team routinely participate in “Hackathons” where we all fly out and compete against teams of other data analysts to build an analytics solution for a variety of challenges in just 2 days. This ensures that we’re all kept sharp and on top of our game, whilst also allowing us to connect with other cool data individuals and organisations. We’re proud to have placed 1st in our latest Hackathon, building an automated solution to allow Transport for London to monitor all of their assets and classify them on a map, on a scale of their flood risk, thus allowing them to pinpoint where to direct their resources to protect them. We did this with code-free analytical tools, machine learning, and AI in just 10 hours of work! Now, I don’t like to flex but I think that’s pretty cool….Our Hackathon submissions are filmed and uploaded to our Continuum YouTube channel – check them out to see what we did.
We’re currently investing heavily in online content creation, marketing, and growing our team. We collaborate with Phil Slatter’s awesome team at Reel Creative, another Digital Jersey member, on our new YouTube video content. I’ve been having so much fun being centre stage shouting to the world about what we do.
Our challenge hasn’t ever been that we can’t do the work, hah no, we KNOW we can deliver, the issue is that people just don’t know what we have to offer. My mission is to change that perception and boil down what can sometimes be complicated technical theory and strategy and deliver it in bite-sized, easy-to-understand content to reach new clients here in Jersey, and across the globe. Continuum really is thriving, and I’m honoured to be at the heart of it.
If you had to explain your job to a group of five-year-olds, how would you do it?
(Bonus points for using toys or props!)
You can think of my job, data analysis and process automation in terms of Lego!
Let’s imagine a big, big pile of Lego bricks just all jumbled up in a box – pretty messy right?
Each Lego brick is like a bit of data that a business holds. You have no idea what types of bricks you have, what colours are there, nor how many of each. This is what it’s like for many businesses today – they have plenty of data, but no idea what is where, or how to report on what they have.
Now in order to fix this, businesses would pay people to go into the big Lego box of data and pull out each individual brick and organise them into piles of the same type and colour. They’d then put them into groups and piece them together in order to build things that tell a story about how their business is performing.
The problem is that getting people to go in and pick out these bricks manually one-by-one, is super slooow, and boring! Plus, a lot of the time people would make mistakes, meaning that what they build isn’t a true reflection of what the business does. Eventually, everyone gets fed up and the Lego blocks just get left in the corner and no one wants to play with them because it’s too hard.
What I do as a job is I come in and use very special tools to help take the big pile of jumbled up Lego bricks and automatically sieve them through different pipes and holes so that they are all aligned nice and neatly, and then use fancy robots (artificial intelligence) to take the organised bricks and automatically build all the different lego figures you could ever want!
The businesses are then so much happier because the boring manual part of organising and building all their jumbled Legos is taken away and they get to play all day with what the robots build for them.
What got you into doing YouTube videos for Continuum? We saw you’ve had over 50k views for the one below (wow!)
It all started because I found myself delivering the same product demonstrations to my clients on calls all the time. A spark of inspiration came to me “Ah! Why don’t I just record myself delivering these demos and then I can share these with clients, rather than repeating them from scratch each time?”.
I downloaded some free, open-source screen recording software online, put on my headset and got recording by myself. I’d just book a room in the Digital Jersey Hub (another great DJ resource!) for a couple of hours every so often to create my initial content.
This was before Continuum even had a YouTube channel, and I uploaded these first videos to my own personal YouTube channel just so I could get them online and shareable.
Below is my very first YouTube video, I’ve improved so much since then – practice really does makes perfect!
Eventually, it got to a point where we created our own Continuum YouTube channel, and I got busy recording more demo content. This was so much fun for me, and I could feel deep down that this is what I was made for.
Years later I pitched the idea to Dan Hare (Continuum founder) that we need to invest more into our YouTube channel and content production. There’s only so far that you can go with just free screen-recording software and a cheap headset – we needed to take it to the next level!
Now working with the Reel Creative team down at their studios I now film top-quality content on hot topics in the data and AI world, all masterfully edited by Phil Slatter and his team.
Me and Reel Creative are a force to be reckoned with – the best is yet to come!!
What advice would you give to someone wanting to kick start their career in data and technology?
Be constantly curious and teach yourself something new online. I never thought I would end up in data and technology, but in my first job at Standard Bank, I taught myself VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code on Google and started playing around building Excel macros to automate repeated process steps. This eventually got noticed by the IT team internally and I got promoted to an Application Development Technician which is where I met Dan Hare (Continuum founder), who was working there for C5 Alliance as a contractor at the time. When Dan left C5 to set up Continuum he was impressed with my work at the bank so reached out to me over LinkedIn and offered me the opportunity to join him – I was the first person he hired!
It’s been over 7-years now and I’ve never looked back since. It really goes to show that you never know how life will go, and if I never took the initiative to teach myself something new then I wouldn’t be where I am today.
