5 Things You Won't Learn About Me From My CV

CVs are useful.

Mine will tell you about my education, previous roles, certifications and technical skills. It will tell you that I've worked in banking, education and self-employment, and that these days I spend quite a lot of time with SQL, Power BI, Excel and data.

All true.

But it won't tell you that I've been asking “why?” since I was old enough to annoy people with it.

Or that I genuinely think I could have made a decent detective.

And it definitely won't explain why learning English turned out to be only part of learning how to live in England.

So this post is a little different.

No project. No dashboard. No dataset.

Just five things about the person behind the CV.

1. I'm an introvert who actually likes people

I think I'm an introvert, although perhaps not in the way people sometimes imagine introverts.

I genuinely like people.

I enjoy good conversations. I'm interested in people's experiences, what they think and why they behave the way they do. I've also somehow managed to spend most of my working life in roles involving people - customers, students, parents, clients.

But I also really like closing the door and being left alone.

After a lot of interaction, I need quiet. That's how I recharge.

It's probably one of the reasons I enjoy living in a smaller town.

I like having people around me, but I don't need constant noise, crowds or activity.

I like people.

I just value peace as well.

Looking at my career history, choosing teaching, banking and running a business was perhaps an interesting strategy for someone who regularly needs a break from humanity.

But strangely, I think both sides are important to me.

I enjoy understanding people.

I also enjoy having enough quiet to think.

2. I've been asking “why?” since I was a child

This definitely didn't begin when I discovered data analysis.

I was an annoying question-asking child.

Why?

But why?

How does that work?

What happens if...?

I imagine the adults around me had a wonderful time.

That part of me never really disappeared.

I'm curious about a ridiculous range of things.

I can become interested in how a business works, why people behave in a particular way, how something was built, why a process exists or some completely random subject that I knew nothing about yesterday.

I don't particularly enjoy “that's just how it is” as an answer if there's an opportunity to understand what's actually happening.

And I've realised that this affects the way I choose my data projects too.

I find it much harder to get excited about:

“I need a Python project for my portfolio.”

I much prefer:

“There's something here I want to understand. How can I find out?”

Then I can decide whether I need Python, SQL, Excel, Power BI or something else.

The question interests me more than the tool.

Apparently, I've just found a professionally acceptable use for all those childhood whys.

3. I probably would have made a decent detective

I'm not claiming I'd be particularly useful in a dramatic police chase.

Let's make that clear.

I'm talking about the other part.

I notice details.

I like putting pieces together. I notice when two things don't quite match, when something looks unusual or when an explanation doesn't completely fit what I'm seeing.

And once I've noticed it, leaving it alone becomes surprisingly difficult.

This is probably one of my favourite parts of working with data too.

Sometimes I'll get a result and think:

Hang on. That doesn't look right.

And that's when it gets interesting.

Maybe I've made a mistake.

Maybe there's a problem with the data.

Maybe two things have been defined differently.

Or maybe the result is completely correct and I've just found something I wasn't expecting.

Either way, I want to know.

One question becomes another, which becomes another, and suddenly the thing I was going to check “quickly” has turned into a small investigation.

Unfortunately, this characteristic is not limited to datasets.

My family can confirm that!

4. My education probably says quite a lot about what interests me

On paper, the subjects I've studied over the years might look like quite an unusual combination.

Psychology and management. English. Education. And now data and business analysis.

I didn't choose them as part of some carefully designed master plan that would eventually lead to analytics.

That would be a much neater story, but it wouldn't be true.

Looking back, though, I can see a pattern.

I've always been interested in people.

How they think. How they communicate. Why they behave in certain ways. How they learn. How they work together. How organisations work around them.

Data added another perspective to that curiosity.

Now I can ask not only what people say is happening, but what the evidence suggests is happening.

And I really like the combination.

Perhaps that's also why I'm naturally more interested in the business question behind an analysis than in using a particular tool simply because I know how to use it.

The technical side matters.

But I want to understand the people, process or business sitting behind the numbers too.

5. Learning English was one thing. Learning the British was another.

I'm Polish and I've lived in the UK for years.

My English is obviously a rather important part of that experience.

But learning the language was only part of learning how to live and work here.

I'm still learning the culture.

There are things you can say perfectly normally in Poland that, translated directly into English, suddenly sound much stronger than you intended.

The way people disagree can be different.

Humour is different.

The way you ask for something is different.

Even the amount of cushioning required before saying “I don't think that's a good idea” can sometimes feel like its own linguistic skill.

I've had to adapt parts of the way I communicate, and I still notice those differences after all these years.

Perhaps my background in psychology makes me pay even more attention to them.

Because communication isn't only about whether the words are technically correct.

It's also about how another person interprets them.

Two people can hear exactly the same sentence and take something completely different from it.

Living between two languages and cultures has made me much more aware of that.

And I think that's something no language certificate could ever really teach me.

So, that's me

Five things that probably won't fit neatly into the Skills section of a CV.

• I'm an introvert who likes people but also really likes when those people occasionally go away.

• I've been asking why for as long as I can remember.

• I enjoy investigating things far more than is probably necessary.

• My slightly unusual collection of degrees makes more sense when I look at what has always interested me.

• And living in another country taught me that learning how people communicate can be much more complicated than learning their language.

  
  

None of those things is a technical skill.

But they all influence the way I work.

They affect the questions I ask, the details I notice, the projects I choose, the way I approach problems and the way I communicate what I've found.

My CV can tell you what I've done.

I suppose this tells you a little more about who's actually doing it.

And now I've talked about myself for an entire blog post.

That's quite enough of that.

I'm going back to the data!