Meet Immo

Meet Immo - 30 - Data Engineer - The Structurer

Hello everyone! It’s that time again - we would like you to meet one of our precious team members.🥳

This time we would like to introduce you to Immo Bohlsen. Back in 2019, Immo was the very first employee to get hired at edyoucated. You are curious how his “road to edyoucated” looked like, what tasks he typically takes care of as a Data Engineer and what characterizes his favorite edyoucated moments?

Just keep on reading!

Hi Immo 👋

Glad we finally got the chance to catch you and are allowed to steal a bit of your time in order to get some answers to our questions. First things first - who is Immo Bohlsen? What should we - and the people out there - know about you?

Hey everyone!

My name is Immo and I’m a data engineer at edyoucated. After growing up at the Northern cost of Germany (close to Jever, famous for the best beer in the world), I went to Münster, where I studied Information Systems like almost half of our team. Whenever someone has a data-related question at edyoucated, it’s probably not a bad idea to ask me. 🙂

When I’m not at work, I like to read crime literature, especially by Scandinavian authors like Jo Nesbø, or enjoy watching a nice series on Netflix. Currently I’m waiting for season 3 of Dark, which is definitely one of the best series I’ve ever seen. Apart from that I’m interested in the stock market and have been trading for several years. I also like to play soccer, although it has been quite some time thanks to Corona.

Your official job title is called “Data Engineer” - could you explain a bit further what that means exactly? What does a typical data engineer do on a daily basis?

Typically, a data engineer is responsible for operating data pipelines and implementing ETL (extract-transform-load) processes. In other words, she has to make sure that data from all relevant sources is collected, transformed and stored in a format suitable for analytical and machine learning use cases. Actually, that’s exactly what I did within the first months of my time at edyoucated. 🤓

However, as we are still an early stage startup with a relatively small team, setting up the data infrastructure is not the only thing I’m working on. For example, I have been a mentor in one of our first learning journeys and curated some roles and learning paths for our platform. Moreover, I support our product team by providing data-based insights as well as specifying features such as our learning analytics dashboard which has been released a couple of weeks ago.

Joining a newly founded early stage startup as the first full-time employee is probably not an opportunity one gets every day. Could you tell us a bit about your road to edyoucated? Why did you decide to join our team?

I already knew Jan and Jannik from my previous job at another startup located in Münster, where I’ve worked as a data analyst and product manager. When Jannik first told me about his idea to set up a new startup and explained the product and business model, I liked the idea, but to be honest, I was not sure if it could work without having partnerships with the standard content providers. However, I started do some research and quickly realized that it is possible to create outstanding learning journeys based on freely available content (and to a certain degree, TechLabs had already proven that at that time).

Once my initial doubts were removed, I got to know David. In our first meeting, it was already obvious that data will not only be an essential part of the company in terms of making data-informed decisions, but it will also be of high importance for the product itself (just think of our AI-based personalization approach). For a person who loves to work with data this seemed like a perfect match. And of course, it was also a huge chance to setup a state-of-the-art data infrastructure using cutting-edge technologies.

In the end, I decided to join edyoucated before I even met Marius. And obviously, that also means that Marius didn’t know me before he agreed to hire me as the first employee of edyoucated. I really hope he doesn’t regret it so far… 😉

Looking back - what would you say was your favorite edyoucated moment? Anything that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the last 13 months?

It’s very hard to pick just one, so let me just pick two, one professional and one social 😃

From the professional perspective, it was probably the moment when one of the groups taking part in our first data management learning journey demonstrated the results of their practical project. Within just three months, they were able to apply a machine learning model in order to forecast future sales based on the company’s historic data (not just a simple fake dataset) and visualize the results using a Power BI dashboard. Taking into consideration that the members of the group didn’t have any prior knowledge regarding machine learning techniques, the programming language Python and Power BI, the results were just amazing. It proved that our combination of personalized learning paths, practical projects and individual mentoring support works as we hoped it would.

From the social perspective, I really liked our first official team event. Although my team lost the escape room challenge, it was lots of fun 🎉

In case someone thinks about applying for an open position as an intern, working-student or full-time employee, what would he or she have to know about us? Anything out of the ordinary that characterizes our team?

In my opinion, the quality of the individual team members is really something that sets us apart from “ordinary” companies. It doesn’t matter who is working on a particular task, you can always be sure that the result will be good. And when something can be improved after all, everyone is open to constructive feedback. Due to the high level of transparency across the teams, everyone is invited to give feedback on every task. This is something I have not experienced in my previous jobs.

Last but not least - we just have to ask a question about the topic of learning. If you had some free time and could choose to learn something new - what would you learn?

As mentioned above, I’m interested in the stock market. However, I never found the time to learn the details of technical analysis. I know, a pretty nerdy topic, but it should be interesting, I guess.🤷

By the way: Anyone else owning Wirecard shares? 😥

And it’s a wrap! Thanks Immo.

Thank you!

You would like to become part of our team as well? Check out our open positions!

Cannot wait to get more details about our team? In case you haven’t checked them out already, we also talked to Marius, Nils, Marcus, Jan, Tim, David and Noor from our team!