Strategy Analyst, John Gower

Todays post is by guest blogger John Gower about his journey to becoming a Strategy Analyst. John is an analyst at NerdWallet. If you have any questions for him, please post in the comment section below.

Life as a Strategy Analyst

When I started college, I was actually thinking I would major in math. I started out taking calculus courses, and my first semester I also had a statistics course. I enjoyed calculus a lot, although I already knew that I would since I took AP calculus in high school, but I realized that I also loved statistics. What I love about it is that statistics offer such a concise way to understand the world and visualize complex trends. After that first semester, I started thinking more about math and what I wanted to do with it and it dawned on me that I didn’t even have a reason for going into math other than the fact that I had always been good at it. I visited an advisor at the beginning of my second semester and she suggested a few majors, but the one that caught my attention was actuarial sciences.

I’m lucky that the University of Wisconsin—my alma mater—has such a strong actuarial sciences program because otherwise I might have ended up somewhere totally different! Once I declared my major, I branched out from math classes to take economics, business, finance, and accounting classes. I will say that business is not my favorite subject (it’s a major filled with hyper-extroverts), but even though I had mixed feelings about it, it was a great experience for learning to work with different types of people. And honestly, learning to work with business-types has been one of the most beneficial things I’ve done in terms of my career. Of course, I also took general education requirements. Although composition was another skill I wasn’t eager to acquire, learning how to express myself in writing has—clearly!—become an important part of my life.

Career

As a strategy analyst, my work covers a lot of territory. A strategy analyst is kind of like the navigator for a business, or maybe even like the person on a ship sitting up in the crow’s nest keeping an eye out for things on the horizon. My job involves working with business to analyze trends and optimize their processes. So, I have to think about what issues are going to affect them in the future. Is there a new technology that will disrupt the business in terms of what customers want or how the business is run? Strategy analysts combine this statistics-based fortune telling with a bit of business analysis and sometimes even some project management to make sure the business stays on course and doesn’t run aground on anything unexpected. If I’ve done my job right, when a new trend or technology hits the scene, I’ll have predicted it (in a general sense; I’m not a wizard), and the business will already have plans in place to deal with it.

Models

It’s a little cliché, but I have had great success working with Porter’s Five Forces Analysis model. This model has been around since 1979 (although it has since been updated), which makes it sound like it should be old and irrelevant, but it has held up quite well. The basic premise of this model is that a business has to manage supply and demand to make a profit and it explicates the five forces that act on the balance of supply and demand. For example, new entrants to the marketplace, increased (or decreased) bargaining power from customers or suppliers, the presence of knock-offs, and competition among firms can all destabilize the current status quo. These five forces are an excellent guideline for anyone working in strategic analysis because they help you identify potential threats and opportunities before they arise.

I’ve enjoyed work as a strategy analyst—it satisfied my desire to analyze numbers and use them to make predicts and recognize larger patterns.  I would definitely recommend you explore this career further!

John Gower is an analyst for NerdWallet, a personal finance website dedicated to helping you save money with tips on everything from work to the best CD rate.