Where are they now? An interview with Hitomi Shibata

Can you tell me a bit more about yourself? (Name, where you live, what you do for your career, etc.)

I'm Hitomi. I live in Nijmegen but am originally from Japan. Last October I started my new business teaching Japanese online as I wanted to bring my passion together which is teaching and data engineering.

What inspired you to pursue a career in tech?

During my master's in Pedagogical Science and internship at an NGO, I worked on various data, from clinical to educational. I found myself most excited about analyzing the data, especially the part where I applied different analyses and found patterns.

However, I realized that most of the time, I worked on the data independently from the prior data processing phase including how the data is collected, stored, and cleaned. I wanted to understand and get involved in these parts more as they can lead to better data quality, seamless transition between data cleaning and analysis, therefore, better performance in data analysis. As a result,  I became very eager to learn the data life cycle and how top IT companies handle data using advanced techniques. 

How long have you been in the industry? Can you tell us a bit more about your journey to get where you are today?

My journey started in 2023 October, from an IT traineeship. During the traineeship, I learned both key concepts in Computing Science and practical skills in data engineering such as building data pipelines in Cloud systems and working as a data expert in a project with Scrum methodology. I also dedicated myself to obtaining certificates including  Azure Fundamentals and Google Data Analytics.

Afterward, I decided to start my own business to put my strengths and motivation together. I'm currently working on building a platform to learn Japanese using LLM(Large Language Model). To achieve this, I'm also taking programming and big data engineering courses at a university and talking to LLM experts.

You're a recent recipient of our scholarship - I'd love to know more about what you put the bursary towards and how you applied what you learned to your career?

I'm going to use the bursary to get certificates in data engineering and machine learning in cloud systems. I'd like to improve my skills by being specialized in cloud tools. Moreover, acquiring machine learning techniques will help me with my ongoing project and my career as almost all companies apply AI tools in their projects.  I will also use the rest for my personal projects, processing big data in Databricks. I believe these experiences will enhance my capability for handling complex real-world data in various settings. 

  Do you have any advice or lessons for women entering the tech industry?

The thing I learned soon after I landed on this industry is that there are many communities that support women who are keen to strive in the industry. In those communities, people are very helpful and eager to learn from each other. So my advice is, please take this advantage and expand your network.  Share your story and learn from others' paths in the network :) That helped me a lot to find more opportunities and also more importantly, keep up with my work with fun.