BSc (Hons), PhD, 1997
Current Job Title: Business Analyst
Employer: Accenture (Andersen Consulting), Wellington
Commencing studies at the University of Otago in 1990, I completed a BSc (Hons) degree, majoring in Chemistry (1993), and a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry (late 1997).
Since early 1998, I have been employed by Andersen Consulting as a Business Analyst in their Wellington practice. Andersen Consulting is the world’s leading management consulting firm. I have been privileged to work with clients in several different industries, including manufacturing, telecommunications and utilities. As a Business Analyst I have been involved in a variety of roles including planning, process design, coding, application testing, user training, and proposal preparation. The roles are demanding and often involve me being “thrown at the deep end”, having to quickly get up to speed with my new role and new challenges. Despite the variety of roles that I have been involved in there are many core skills common to all. These include communication skills, time management, being thorough and seeing a job through to completion, being systematic/ methodical and logical, being creative, meeting deadlines, and working with others in a group environment.
While I am not specifically using my practical or theoretical chemistry knowledge, there is much that I learned during my years of Chemistry that I am currently using and building on. These skills were developed during thesis writing, following/ developing/ documenting an experimental method (reasoning, eliminating redundant steps or introducing new ones), giving seminars, taking laboratories and tutorials, being systematic in recording results, report writing, time management. There are many parallels between these “Chemistry” skills and the skills mentioned above.
Contact: Dr. Geoffrey S. Dunbar, Accenture (Andersen Consulting), Wellington, New Zealand
