Cool Careers & How You Got Them
A conversation with professionals who have cool and interesting jobs and a description of their career path, targeted at high schoolers, hosted by Zain Raza, a current high schooler.
Cool Careers & How You Got Them
2.2 - EY Managing Director in Consulting Services Jonathan Yee
In this episode, Mr. Yee describes his role as a director of a consulting group. with a focus on AI and technology.
no-transcript. Yeah we're very, very lucky to have you on the show today, and let's just start how we always do. What is your official title?
Speaker 2:So I guess officially on paper. Managing Director in the AI and data practice at EY.
Speaker 1:Okay, can you tell us a little bit about what that entails?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. The practice that we're in we cover everything from data strategy to data governance, data quality, ai platforms, anything, data platforms, the data pipelines that build up our data platforms. So we cover a lot of ground there. The work that I do specifically and I mentioned data strategy, data governance, data quality those are kind of like my sweet spots at the firm. If you think of data strategy, it's how do we align our approaches to data to the strategy of the organization. So you think everything has to be tethered in business value and we try to drive our data initiatives to drive and enable value for the business. Data governance when you think of data governance, it's the people process side of data. So when we think of the organizational structure that you put in place in order to better manage data, to secure data, to mitigate risk around data, to improve the quality of the information being consumed by the business, these are the types of things that we do.
Speaker 1:And when you're talking about data, what kind of data is it?
Speaker 2:So data can mean a lot of different things. Data can be, let's say, for example, for a large company, it could be their lists of customers. It can be their financial data, the data that they report to the street. It can be data which is like lists of vendors. It could be all their transactions, their sales data. It can be their analytical data, which is all the information they pull together to make decisions off of and build business insights. These days, ai being a huge topic of interest, a lot of our information that we help them to manage and to improve upon is consumed through AI capabilities, which now is creating a lot more opportunities to better leverage information, but it also widens the scope of what types of information become useful, which means it's a bigger chore to manage all that information as well.
Speaker 1:Useful- which means it's a bigger chore to manage all that information as well. Okay, got it. So, as you know, the show is targeted at teenagers, so we want to know what were you like when you were a teenager?
Speaker 2:Okay, so that's an interesting question. So I guess, as a teenager I think of my high school years. So I was a really good student. I always got good grades, honor student, top of the class. When I think of the other things that I do played a lot of sports Back when I was younger. It wasn't so much of an emphasis on travel sports. People didn't do that as much. Maybe in my town the top three to five kids would be playing travel sports. Everyone else was doing pickup sports. So I played a lot of hockey, football, baseball, stickball, stuff like that. But we were playing a lot of sports after school. In high school I always had jobs too. I worked as a. Even before high school I had my first job as a paper boy delivering newspapers, which I don't know how much of a job that is these days. But all through high school I worked and had various jobs, working at the bowling alley, bussing tables, you name it. I probably had a job in that area.
Speaker 1:Did you learn anything from any of those jobs that you keep with you today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know every job that I've had probably had some learning built into it. You know a lot of it had to do with discipline and just understanding how to schedule your time. You know you have to be at your work at a certain time. You have to manage your time well. You have to know that if I have to be at work early in the morning, maybe I can't stay out all night. I have to bed a little earlier. So those types of things, just about responsibility.
Speaker 2:It was really important for me as a high schooler. Right, I think it probably wasn't until college that I started thinking more career oriented. I know high school these days is probably a bit different than when I went to high school, where they're already having those conversations around career directions and trying to understand what the passion is for the students. I think for us it was a little different. Where it was, at least for myself, it was just trying to make a buck. But I think in that there's value, even in just understanding again my time management, how to manage money. So now at this point I'm making my own money, I'm putting it in my own savings account. I actually was tracking. It's kind of funny to say, but I was tracking my savings in a spreadsheet, right, and it was on paper. At the time I had a little bit of graph paper and I would make little charts about my money, which was small dollars back then, but it was something for me to track and it was my own form of analytics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. So did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Speaker 2:No, no, not really it was. You know, when I was in high school I actually was taking some computer animation courses, so I knew how to do animation. When I went to college and started doing my coursework, I continued doing stuff in the arts which was animation, film editing, video editing, and this was a time when the initial Toy Story movie came out Pixar. So you can kind of triangulate on my age based on that statement. But the very first Pixar came out right when I was starting college and I said you know, that's what I wanted to do, so that's what I had set my sights on.
Speaker 2:Oddly enough, when I graduated from college was the dot-com boom time right. So all the startups back when the internet was first being discovered as a viable means for monetization. That's when all those startups started taking off and the opportunities to make money in that space were plentiful. So I found myself just kind of naturally finding a progression into web development, which is how I got more into the tech side and away from the computer animation stuff. I was now doing more of the coding, working with data, and you can kind of see how the tracks were starting to be laid for what is now my career. I started getting into computer programming data management through these various startups that I was working on during the dot-com bubble days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it seems like a big jump from film animating to consulting data and analytics, but, um, so you mentioned maybe a career that you had before, the current one, not like the paper boy and the bussing tables, but like a more yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So after I graduated from undergrad, from college, um, and I'll kind of tell you how I got into the web development work, first I at the point I was just trying to make a living and do something, cause I wanted to be off on my own and making money. So I actually applied for a job as a, as an admin for this music distribution company on Long Island. Um, it was literally the job to be their receptionist. I would sit at the front desk, at the door and people would come in, I would greet them and have them queued up for the meetings that they were supposed to be having that day. And I applied for the job.
Speaker 2:I went for the interview and they saw on my resume that in college I built one website and literally it was a three-page website. If it had one image on it and a bunch of text, it was very basic. It was a college project. And they said, oh, you've built websites before. And I said, well, I built one website, three pages and a small project for school. And they said, oh, that's interesting. And they said, what do you think of becoming our web designer? And they said we will give you a computer. Any books you want. We're not going to pay for training, but we'll give you any books that you want and if you can teach yourself to be a web coder then we will hire you full-time as our web designer.
Speaker 2:So they gave me a three-month runway and they said we're going to hire you at the receptionist rate. So I actually was hired at it was something like $14 an hour and I was hired at the receptionist temp rate and just said they said listen, spend three months, see if you can teach yourself to be a web designer and start building our intranet site. So I did that. Three months later they said yeah, we like what you built. They gave me salary, they made me a full-time web developer and I did that for two years with that company until I moved on and started hopping around to different startup companies. But it was a really good experience for me to get into the tech world, get into the data world. It's built a great foundation for me which I still build off of every day today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So. Obviously I think you have a cool career because you're on the show, but in your opinion, what makes your career cool or unique?
Speaker 2:So maybe I should talk a little bit about what I'm, a little more about the consulting side, because the consulting side is a bit of a pivot from the hands-on tech work that I was doing before I did. After the dot-com started kind of falling apart a little bit and that was kind of like a global phenomenon that only the really top level startups were continuing to make it in the market and a lot of the others that were more on paper good investments started to kind of falter. So I went back to school, got my MBA and my MSIS degrees from Boston University. So I decided I needed to retool myself, got the business side of the education that I didn't have in undergraduate and then I came out and started doing consulting work.
Speaker 2:Now the consulting work that I do now it's tethered in tech and data. That's like the content or the subject matter of what I do. But most of the work that I do I'm engaging with the business side of the house. So now I'm working very closely with functional teams like finance and supply chain marketing groups, things like that, that have data issues, and we are kind of that straddling role between business and IT where we help them kind of translate the requirements, help IT execute what the business needs. So we sit in that role where we're kind of helping each of the parties work better together and help optimize their capabilities. And sorry, remind me what was the question that you had asked.
Speaker 1:I just want to know, like, what about your career? Do you think is cool or unique?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, this might sound a little cliche to say it, but I'm very much a people person. I do feel like working with other people is a big part of what I do. I think in the tech world and in the data world you get a lot of really smart people that are more introverted, that feel like you know I like working with data, computers. Get me and you know this is my space and maybe not the most extroverted in terms of reaching out to others and wanting to have conversations and meetings. I am actually more of the latter, I feel like for myself, working with other people face to face, preferably. These days we do we do a lot of this virtual, through the laptop, unfortunately but I do find that working with other people solving their problems to me that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Probably the thing that I really find fascinating about it is that in my space I am what I would call industry agnostic, so I don't stick to one industry and say I'm just going to do work in automotive manufacturing, let's say, or I'm only going to do work in life sciences. To me, for the most part, data is data. The context of it will change based on a business model, but I work very much across the board in terms of industries. So I have done work with automotive companies. I have done a lot of work in life sciences just being in New Jersey, there's a lot of life sciences work. But I've also done work with a company that makes chicken sandwiches and sells chicken sandwiches, which you could probably figure out who that is, but I can't name names here.
Speaker 1:I have a couple of guesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you probably eat there from time to time. Um, I've done work with uh, let's see, it's one of those agricultural companies, right, companies that make seeds seed for living. Um, I did do a really cool project with a company that builds oil rigs out in the middle of the ocean and that was really fascinating. Um, as far as a story about that one, when we were digging into the data of that company, they would have us go through their material lists and I would look at all the materials that it would take to build an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, which I don't know how many people can say they've seen a list of. What does it take to build an oil rig in the middle of the ocean?
Speaker 2:And I'm looking at this spool of uh, of piping that they had, and I was, and I see it says the, the width or the wall size is three feet. And I said you mean the, the pipe is three feet wide? And I said no, that's the width of the rim of the pipe. Like, think of like a tube and think of the pipe is three feet and it's in metal. And I couldn't even fathom what they were talking about. I said how, like how can that be? Like three foot thick tube and this, how big is this tube? And they said this tube is like like a building, like it's. That's how thick the tube is, and you can imagine a pipe that lays underneath the ocean floor. Right, it's carrying oil from the rig to the mainland.
Speaker 2:And so they were describing this to me and I said how do you even store this stuff? This is. And they said well, it's on a spool. So I said how do you bend metal that's three feet thick in a tube? And they said it's all physics. And then, as they explained it, it makes more and more sense.
Speaker 2:And I'm not a physics person, but they said when you do work at that scale right, so it's so massively huge A three foot thick tube of metal will spool and they'll just bend it around a spool, which is like I still can't even fathom what that would look like, but completely fascinating and something I would have no clue even existed in the world without having my job and the exposure to the data. And I feel like every client I work for in all these different industries, I learn newer things that I wouldn't have even thought existed, even they thought existed, you know. Going back to the chicken sandwich company, they have IOT devices sitting on all the chicken fryers that measure things like temperature and cook cycles and it's just fascinating that this stuff exists and they're using it in these ways.
Speaker 1:So is it ever a struggle for you if you're going from like oil rigs and now chicken sandwiches, like you don't find like any issues going from such different topics.
Speaker 2:That's part of the skill needed to be in this role, especially in this virtual world, like back in the day I would go fly out to all these clients and meet with them, but you'd kind of get into a groove of, oh, I'm in this city, I'm with this client and at least for eight hours of the workday, you know, I'm wearing my chicken hat versus I'm wearing my oil rig hat, right.
Speaker 2:And now it's like I'm on a call with someone you know talking I don't know automotive manufacturing, and then flip side I'm.
Speaker 2:You know, 10 minutes later I'm talking life sciences, right. So sometimes it gets a little tricky, like your head's on a swivel a little bit, but it makes it challenging and it makes it kind of fun and it'll be interesting because you know I'm a big fan of just connecting dots between different types of concepts and sometimes you might find that something you just discussed with a. You know, for example, I was discussing jet engine turbines with one of my clients, right, they're talking IoT devices on the jet engine turbines that are the same devices that the chicken company is using on their chicken fryers right now, and the jet engine turbines have a lot more of the sense of them because they have a lot more things that can go wrong and a lot more drastic risks involved with if something fails on a turbine. But yeah, it's the same concepts and the same ideas and they're measuring things like timing, they're measuring temperatures, they're measuring all that data is being collected and then what they do with it is quite different.
Speaker 2:But just fascinating to see like there's similarities, you know, even at the most granular levels Could you identify a couple of traits that it takes that you need to have to be successful in this field. Yeah, absolutely so. First of all, you need a sharp brain, right? You need to be able to process a lot of this information. Everything gets thrown at you very quickly, so you're drinking from the fire hose all the time. Like every conversation you're in, someone's going to throw something at you that maybe you don't understand how that works in their business model. But you have to quickly kind of get your footing, understand what they're saying, understand the impact of that and why this is, whether a challenge for their organization, but then kind of pivot it and say, okay, now I have some value to add because I have some experience or some knowledge that I can interject into this and then now turn it around into something valuable that you can deliver to them.
Speaker 2:And it's not always that you're going to deliver it in that one meeting. It's often hey, let me do some research, let my team dig into your data, let us analyze the situation a little bit more. We could bring outside perspectives and other subject matter experts to the conversation. A lot of it is also bringing people to the fold, to the conversation, that have the expertise to help answer questions for the client, because I will never pretend to know everything out there. I know a lot of people at my firm that are very smart and have gone a lot deeper on certain topics that maybe I didn't go so deep on, so happy to bring my friends to the conversation and add value to the client that way. But I always do find that being able to pivot those conversations in a way that drives value that's always the central focus for us is how do we drive value for the client and help the client deliver value, whether it's to their shareholders, to their customers, whatever it may be. Again, trying to solve problems.
Speaker 1:So when you're working with a client, are you going solo or do you have a team from EY with you?
Speaker 2:Usually it's a team. Sometimes I'm asked to come in and have like a subject matter expert type of conversation. Usually those types of conversations are more or less chalked up to business development opportunities where I would have a discussion around what's your challenge, how can I help? And then I try to formulate an approach and put together a team to solve the problem for the client. But sometimes they're just asking for a simple answer and they want someone to come in and show them kind of like an EY point of view or a perspective on a topic. And then we share some stuff with them and they say you know what like this is great, very helpful. We're going to try and execute some of it ourselves. But to me you know from a business development standpoint which sales is a big part of my role you're always planting the seed of. You know, if you credentialize yourself really well and you maintain the relationship, they'll come back around and then they'll have work for you to do and put a team on it.
Speaker 1:Okay, why is what you do important?
Speaker 2:So that's, that's a good question. I would say there's a few and it depends on industry, right? So again, let's say I'm in life sciences. For example, we did a project where we were helping a life sciences company to optimize their plasma donation centers, right? So in their plasma donation centers you have folks like you and I that would come into their centers and kind of like giving blood, they would donate plasma, this company would reimburse you. So if you came in and donated plasma they would reimburse you or they would pay you something like $50 for a plasma donation and infuse it with medication and then they would go out and sell that medication in the medical arena for treatments to cancer patients, for example. So that's the start of their supply chain.
Speaker 2:But then they treat the plasma donors like you and I almost similar way to customers, because they need to attract those people to the plasma donation centers. So it's almost like a customer list that you would have mailings. You're trying to, you know, promote the plasma donation centers, have those folks come in. So it was kind of an interesting project. But in my eyes it adds value because it at some point contributes and enables cancer treatments which you know that's. That's probably like a far stretch from data, but you can see how all of these capabilities kind of build up into improvement of data. That then fosters an optimized plasma donation pipeline.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so you're just helping whatever the company is doing, whatever company it may be.
Speaker 2:Okay, I was just going to say, sometimes the end goal for for the company that we're helping it can mean many different things. In this case they were trying to, you know, sell medication but also solve for cancer. Right, treat cancer. I mean, it's all against treat cancer. Um, we have other companies that you know their main goal is cutting costs because they're trying to add value for shareholders, you know, you know, improve stock prep, positioning and stuff like that. So I think, um, again, for each client, the, the value may be different, but the good that we do is to help them solve their problems and deliver value in some way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so is there ever like an ethical consideration? I don't know if this really applies, but do you ever feel differently if you're helping a company like this plasma company who's, you know, benefiting the health of human people, or a company who's kind of questionable about what they're doing?
Speaker 2:That's a good question In terms of so, the ethics of it and us being in kind of a service angle. I guess your question would be more of if you were serving a company that you didn't agree with what they were doing out in the market. I'm trying to think of, like, what a company would be like that. So maybe if there were a company that was known to be a major polluter of the environment, maybe, right, could that be something you know? I guess you could argue, if you're doing work for an automotive company, you hope that they're moving in the right direction. And I'll give you as an example that company that we were doing work for. They were dealing with a major lawsuit that was very public and I won't get into details, but they were dealing with a situation like that, so public and I won't get into details, but they were dealing with a situation like that. So they were coming out of a black eye situation. Right, it didn't happen while we were there, it happened just slightly before we got there, but it's something that you kind of have to deal with in terms of having confidence that that company is doing the right thing. They were trying to remediate the issues around what they were having problems with. But then, if you think of and the reason I was thinking of the automotive company was and you think of pollutants, right, and what goes into the environment coming out of these automobiles that company had made a very early commitment to electric vehicles, so they were looking at doing a lot of hybrid vehicles. At the time. It was more hybrid. Now they're into full-on electric vehicles as well, but at the time they were just getting into the hybrids.
Speaker 2:And I think sometimes these companies aren't perfect. Sometimes people do things that one-off things within companies that maybe make the headlines and and these companies take black eyes. But, um, at some point you know you got to try to find a way to deliver value in an ethical way. You're trying to drive toward that, um, positive light, that you're trying to find some way to help make the world better. Um, that you're trying to find some way to help make the world better, our and not to be cliche, but our EY tagline is to build in a better working world, which is what EY stands by.
Speaker 2:And so sometimes you have, you know, just the same way as you might have a friend that doesn't always do the right things, right, but you try and be a part of that and you know, maybe give that friend a little feedback on. You know you could be doing this a little differently, right? Maybe have you thought about you know if you improved in this way you know, we know, we know you maybe you said something that you didn't want to say and you or you said it the wrong way and you hurt someone's feelings. But could you, could you coach your friend along and kind of get them to a better spot or at least in the right direction? So you're hoping that you're making incremental good at least, even if the company maybe is dealing with some stuff in the headlines that maybe they're not so proud of.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it Now. Can you take us through a regular day at work? We want to hear a day in your life.
Speaker 2:Wow, you're asking some tough questions. A regular day at work? So that, and probably one of the reasons why I've been in this industry for so long I would say I don't think that it's a regular day at work, right? Um, I'll, I'll tell you what it looked like before the pandemic was.
Speaker 2:And consulting is very much known as a as as a traveling type of job. Right, I, I would travel monday through thursday almost every week, right, going to see my clients. I would fly in and out of multiple cities. So if I had three clients to visit visit that week, I might be flying to three different cities and I'd fly out on a monday, meet with my clients, fly somewhere else monday night. So you know, right, so I'd be hopping around.
Speaker 2:But a lot of the work that I do, especially at my level now, I'm going out, having relationships with people, making you know things better for them, trying to find ways to help solve their problems, and I'm going through different types of discussions. These days, you know, the travel part is cut out and kind of like I was saying before, you know we do travel from time to time, but it's more of this, you know, through the laptop, virtual interaction, and then the travel pieces. You know I'm probably traveling somewhere a couple of times every month, but it's not Monday through Thursday every week anymore. Any given day, though, I'm hopping on a laptop, like today, get on a Zoom call with some of my project teams. Right now I have four projects going at the same time so I'll hop on for like a daily standup, connect with the team, see what they're working on, see if they have any blockers, things they need my help or support on, might hop to a client call, might hop to a sales call. So just kind of jumping around a little bit.
Speaker 2:But, like I was saying before, a lot of it is keeping your head on a swivel and trying to stay grounded in the topic of the next call, and a lot of the work that I do is also prepping for other upcoming meetings, helping to make sure our teams are focused and have the right agenda in place and have the right content for a meeting.
Speaker 2:Some of the other work I do is reviewing deliverables that my team is producing, giving feedback, commenting on those deliverables, helping them to get that to a higher level of quality or pulling in other expertise if we need it. Sometimes you might be working on a deliverable and find out. Well, we've got nine out of the 10 topics covered, but one of them we could use a little more expertise and we could infuse that with some help from some of our other EY friends. So, yeah, any given day it kind of fluctuates. It's a bit different. At my level, though, again, I'm dealing with a lot of relationship building and I'm also dealing with a lot of managing teams putting teams together, making sure I help clear blockers for them and help make that connectedness with the client a little smoother.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so you mentioned you still travel every once in a while for work. I'm just curious with the emergence of zoom into the working world, what's the reason for still traveling and actually going somewhere?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the travel piece to me and I think when we went into the pandemic and then we didn't really travel as much, I think we lost a lot of the human side of the work that we do this, this interaction with other people, um, being in a room face to face, is a lot easier to problem solve than it is in a in a zoom call, right. Right, I'm a big fan of whiteboarding and with my art background, that's probably one of my strengths is drawing pictures and I love to draw pictures and that helps me personally to kind of relate to a situation. If we're looking at a data architecture, I always find drawing a picture of it, even if it's a very simple picture, gives everyone something to center on. So we have the same visual, very different place in our heads, and so I'm a big believer of if we have some tough, challenging topics to solve, for, let's get in a room together. Sometimes, if I feel that we're not able to travel, I will pull up whether a PowerPoint deck or just something to kind of do a virtual whiteboard on and try and draw pictures with that, if it helps. Sometimes that helps clear the blockers as well.
Speaker 2:But I do find that being in person, face-to-face, is really important for communication or sharing of ideas, and then I would also say just solving issues right. Any project you're on, you're bringing a lot of smart people together. We're trying to work together, but inevitably there's bumps in the road. You have people to people teaming issues and those things go over a lot smoother. When you're together and you're face-to-face, you can read body language. It's not just can I see the shoulders and up, and the whole idea of being there again adds that human element that I think there's a, there's a layer of that that is kind of blocking us from that 100 pure connection because we're talking through laptops.
Speaker 1:I got it. Do you have a set amount of hours you work a week? If you had to guess how many hours would you say you work a week.
Speaker 2:Um, but I would say I would say 40 at its best is pretty typical, um, but there are certainly times when you know everything's hitting the fan at once and, like I mentioned before, I have four different projects, so if they're all firing at the same time, um, then it's, it's going to be a hellish week at some times, right?
Speaker 2:So there, there are times when you have to learn that and I tell my teams this is be able to recognize when it's time to surge and then when it's time to kind of take the pedal off the metal a little bit and kind of peel back right. And when you find that downtime, you have to recognize okay, this is a safe time to. If I have to go make a doctor's appointment or I have to go do something for my kids, take that time, because you know when it's time to surge. Then you know we may be up at night, you know, trying to get something done, or we're working on the weekends that does happen as well. But you know you got to take the good with the bad and figure out you know how do I balance my life so that I'm okay giving up that precious time, because maybe you know I had some flexibility earlier in the week because I took some time to do something personal that I really wanted to do you know, yeah, got it.
Speaker 1:Are you ever working from home or are you hopping on Zoom calls in a physical office?
Speaker 2:So usually it's from home, from home. But many times if I'm at the office or on a client site, because of this virtual remote environment that we work in now, most clients you know if I'm, whether I'm in the UI office or at home, they still will want to meet right. So I might be in person in the UI office for a number of meetings but I might still go find an office to go take a zoom call, just because it's the way we're operating these days.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so you know we talked a lot about work, but we want to know how you use your free time. What?
Speaker 2:free time. So I, I um, like like your mother, I am also a servant leader, if you want to call it that, or a community leader. We all like to volunteer for stuff and you know, because we don't say no to anything when we see a need for something, we're the types that we roll up our sleeves and jump right in right. So a few things that I do in my volunteer time. I'm on the board for New Jersey Youth Soccer. So at the state level soccer organization, I'm part of that board and I help to guide, particularly in the area of top soccer. Top soccer is a big thing that I do in terms of soccer for children with disabilities, so it's a great program that we run in our town, in Chatham, and I'm helping to run that for the state level as well. So I'm on the board for New Jersey youth soccer. Somehow I found myself serving as the president for Chatham United Soccer, which is our local town soccer club. So another volunteer activity. Unfortunately I don't get paid for any of this, but I spend my time checking soccer goals at fields and checking field conditions and and securing field space for our teams and working with our coaches and our trainers and all that fun stuff, but that's. That's a lot of fun, a lot of work, but a lot of fun as well and a good way for me to connect with the community in our town. So I'm on the board for Chatham United Top Soccer and then, of course, also at Del Barton School, I'm on the Parent Council for Diversity and Inclusion. So that's a role that I had taken on a few years ago when my son started with your school. So for me that's been a very rewarding experience, learning about different cultures, being a part of bringing diversity and inclusion to the parent community at the school as well as to the students, and to me it's been very rewarding and it's also been I'll be honest, it's been very educational.
Speaker 2:I know before we started recording, we were talking about how I hadn't been to China before. I'm Chinese, I'm 100% Chinese, have never been to China before, Chinese have never been to China before, and I grew up in an environment in the US where my culture is a bit diluted in my family, right. So for better or for worse, right, and we have a lot of interracial marriages in my family, including my own. So the whole parent council on diversity and inclusion at Del Barton has been very educational for me, just because I don't come from an environment where we're a strong like in terms of the culture, of where our ethnic background lies. But it's been a very cool journey.
Speaker 2:But yeah, those, those are kind of the ways that I spend my free time and of course, I'd be remiss if not saying, you know, spending time at home with the family doing stuff. We have three small kids doing a lot of their stuff, Uh, they all play sports and do fun activities, Um, and we have two dogs as well. So that kind of rounds out our picture and, as you can imagine, um, very busy uh schedule overall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I was going to say what free time it sounds like. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So what's this next step in the field for you?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. That's a really good question. You know the work that I'm doing right now. It compensates pretty well. I'll say like I don't see a need at this point making a shift in terms of my career. But what I will say and this goes back to the dynamic nature of consulting and how every situation is so much different than the next right and whether it's different industries or different types of work in the consulting space the next big thing for me is AI right. So AI is certainly hitting a wave right now and my next ask of myself is to become well-versed in the AI space and kind of pivot some of my data work to be very much AI centered. So that's a big step that the firm has taken. We've invested a lot of money in AI capabilities and tooling and services, and that, for me, is my own personal challenge now to get on that wave and get more into the AI space, because I find it super fascinating yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I mean, when AI first came on the scene I was just like, oh, homework machine to write my English essays. But every person I've talked to about their career, they all talk about how they're going to start incorporating AI and how the future looks for them. So it's a common theme. So thank you so much for coming on the show. As we wrap up, let's do the mailbag. So to submit for the mailbag, you can email Zane at CoolCareersAndHowYouGotThem. Bag so to submit for the mailbag, you can email Zane at CoolCareersAndHowYouGotThem. Fill out our get in touch form on the website CoolCareersAndHowYouGotThemcom or DM us on the gram at CoolCareersAndHowYouGotThem. So today's question comes from Ava, who is a junior in New York, and her question is I always hear people talk about consulting and being a consultant, but don't really know a lot about it. What does it mean to be a consultant and what can I study in college to become one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a great question. And to be a consultant and to me, I think there's a number of things and, depending on which area of consulting that you want to go into, there could potentially be a lot of avenues in terms of what you choose to study in college. We have folks in our firm from all different types of practices, whether it's finance, accounting, customer-related in terms of customer-facing type services. We have supply chain In my space, I'm in technology consulting and specifically in data. So we have a lot of different areas you could be in. You could be in even. We have an area called people advisory services, which is like the people side of the house people process change management. Those are all big aspects of what we do, but the types of backgrounds that we recruit from, in terms of what you study in college, can be very vast. You could study finance, you can study economics, you could be a comp sci major. We have people that are engineers. We have people with all sorts of different backgrounds.
Speaker 2:My background, like I was saying, I studied computer animation, film editing and video editing and somehow found myself doing consulting work. So I think a lot of it is what types of experiences that you pick up along the way and how do you pivot that into something that is appealing to a consulting firm that might hire you? The other thing I would say in terms of soft skills, communication skills, presentation skills I would say in terms of like soft skills, communication skills, presentation skills, like writing ability, like those are like table stakes. Right, you need that and you need to be top of your game for those things. The other thing that I would say and I think it doesn't get spoken about enough, but I would say I value it a lot and when I interview people, I want to hear about their creativity.
Speaker 2:And maybe I'm biased, coming from an artistic background, but to me creativity is a huge game changer because we have at EY, all like a game players. You know, to get into EY. It's it's very difficult. You know it's a difficult recruiting process to get through Um, we take the top notch people from from the market, but creativity is one that you you may have great grades, you may have a great background, you may be an amazing worker and have great ideas, but then the creativity piece if, if, if, I hand you a document or a presentation deck and ask you to create something for me and it's a blank slate. Can you create something from scratch? Can you put your ideas together and formulate a convincing argument or a compelling story or narrative from nothing, and I think some of our people do that really well and they succeed. I think some those that are challenged to do that find themselves in spots where maybe they're not succeeding or not hitting the level of success that they wanted to at the firm. So to me, creativity is a huge game changer.
Speaker 1:And just going back on what you said, the one thing I noticed about consulting is how unique all of your backgrounds are, Because I was doing a quick externship at another consulting company and this guy there was talking about this project he was doing for steel production. I was like, oh, that's really interesting. What was your background? What did you study in college? And he was like neuroscience. Yeah right, you wouldn't think that those two things are necessarily connected and all the people there had such were at such different um majors in college and they're all working in really cool areas.
Speaker 2:Um, so if people want to learn more about what you do, or you yourself work and they go, yeah, so um, well, if you want to learn about EY and the services that we provide, eycom is our um URL. If you want to find out about me, you can look me up on LinkedIn. Jonathan, yee, you can find me there. That's probably a good way to get a hold of me as well. You can ping me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to connect.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and now this is usually everybody's favorite part You've got the ear of many highly ambitious students. Do you have any final advice for them or an ask for them?
Speaker 2:Final advice I would say don't be afraid of the hard work, right. Work ethic in my eyes means a lot and people will recognize that there's no shortcuts to success, right? So I would say put in the hard work, put in the hard miles. It'll pay off, not only in the sense that people will respect that and that will help you get to where you want to be, but you put in those reps and that's how you learn and that's how you gain experience, knowledge and wisdom. You don't want to do those shortcuts and then find, oh my God, I shot up the ladder but I'm at a point where, looking back, I don't have enough experience or skillset to manage the people that I'm now looking back over and find yourself in a tricky spot where you kind of cut too many corners and either you're not able to progress now to the next level and your career stalls out.
Speaker 2:But I would say don't be afraid of the hard work, it'll take you far. And I guess the other thing I would say is be patient, right? We see a lot of people these days who are chomping at the bit to climb up the ladder, looking for that next big promotion, and that's great. Be ambitious. I'm good with ambition. I'm good with people wanting to get to the right spots, but also be patient, because the hard work does get recognized, the high quality work certainly gets recognized, and I think that patience and the collaboration that you exert with your peers and your teammates I think all of that goes a far away.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. Thanks for having me. This has been a pleasure.
