What's your job about?
During my first rotation, I worked in Super, Tax, and Registry Systems (STARS) at the ATO. My team is responsible for partnering with service providers, businesses, and industries to deliver IT solutions and support for key products across ATO’s taxation, superannuation, and business registry systems.
Our team plans projects over a 3-month period on as we adopt the Agile methodology style of project management. As an IT Systems Analyst, some of my responsibilities include testing certain features and functions in our systems' front and back end. One of the projects that my team worked on was ensuring that foreign owners of Australian assets were able to verify their identity when managing their tax affairs.
I had the opportunity to learn many different skills and tools, mainly surrounding project management and the environment we used to test our features in.
What's your background?
I was born and raised in Melbourne. After finishing high school, I studied a Bachelor of International Business. During my degree, I had the opportunity to study abroad on an exchange program to Holland which was an incredible experience and I strongly recommend to anyone who are thinking about it. After graduating, I found that I had little interest in business and undertook a Graduate Certificate in Analytics, which introduced me to more technical skills. After studying, I gained experience as a data scientist through an internship working on property data and joined a market research firm as a support analyst throughout 2021.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Absolutely. Although this job required technical skills and background knowledge, the team I worked with taught me to use programs and tools that I never used before. Through shadowing my team members and asking a lot of questions, I was well underway to tackling the responsibilities on my own. At the end of my rotation, I also had the opportunity to train other Systems Analysts in doing what I do.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
Working with people who have the wealth of knowledge that is around you. The people you interact with daily give you an insight into a lot of topics that could interest you.
What are the limitations of your job?
Working on a 3-month timeline means that sometimes our team misses our fortnightly timelines, which delays the overall project completion time. If there are enough delays, future project iterations start later, and plans need to be adjusted.
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