Passionate about I.T., sustainability, marketing, localisation and economic growth, Daragh Craig secured a role as a Data Analyst with Accenture after graduating from the MSc in Food Business and Innovation at Cork University Business School.
Deeply analytical, Daragh landed his current position by being able to combine the reasoning skills he developed as a philosophy student at UCC with the business nous he acquired at CUBS.
I knew after graduating with a degree in philosophy that I would need to gain some practical skills if I was going to apply some of the more abstract learnings from the programme.
While employers really appreciate people who can critically analyse information, being able to apply that knowledge in a business context requires you to have practical skills.
Along with my interest in the food economy, that’s what drew me to the MSc in Food Business and Innovation.
As a Data Analyst with Accenture, Daragh has been given the opportunity to apply much of what he learned during the postgraduate programme across a number of IT projects in an office related environment.
As part of his day-to-day, Daragh deploys his analytical and problem-solving skills to build marketing and business development strategies for clients, echoing much of what he learned while studying the MSc in Food Business and Innovation at CUBS.
For example, as part of the postgraduate programme, Daragh spent five months working with Cork County Council and the Local Enterprise Office, where he completed a research report that looked at ways of promoting start up food businesses.
While on placement, he also developed marketing strategies to promote the Cork Incubator Kitchens project, which provides two rentable kitchen spaces to small food businesses.
The vibrant project has enabled many small food businesses to explore the possibility of expansion with minimal financial risk. This experience aspired Daragh to pursue a long term career in economic development in the near future and potentially start up his own business company.
Although it remains something of an aspiration for the moment, after being exposed to the worlds of food business and consulting, Daragh will be in the enviable position of being able to mobilise his entrepreneurial mindset with a developed business acumen should an opportunity present itself .
Those are skills that Daragh can continue to sharpen as he progresses his career with Accenture, demonstrating that people may not always end up in a role necessarily related to their master's degree, and that certain positions such a data analyst can be a steppingstone to gaining experience and progressing one’s career further up the ladder.