Taariq Ismail: RELX, Accenture and OC&C

**Taariq Ismail** (0:00)
I think reaching out to people. So that's one thing.
Folks are always happy for others to reach out to them. And it's something I wish I did a bit more of when I was trying to figure out what to do.

**Aayush Sonthalia** (0:14)
Welcome to Secrets of the City, the show where we uncover the stories behind the people who work in the highly lucrative, yet enigmatic jobs of the city of London. I'm your host, Aayush Sonthalia. And on the show today, we welcome Taariq Ismail. Taariq grew up in Harare, Zimbabwe, and is currently a Corporate Strategy Manager at RELX.
But prior to that, Taariq had a long stint in consulting. In fact, his career in consulting began even before university. Before starting at Oxford, where he studied engineering, Taariq spent a year at Accenture as part of a gap year program.
He then joined Accenture full time after university as a consultant for three years, and then moved to OC&C, where he joined the Analytics Division and was there for two and a half years. But Taariq didn't always know that he was going to be a consultant. In fact, there were a few other options available to him at the time.

**Taariq Ismail** (1:04)
I was just looking at what's out there, and there was a few different things. I thought that I would do an engineering gap year scheme. And there's a scheme called the Year in Industry, where basically people before uni or even in the middle of uni do one year out.
So I thought that I was going to do that. And I nearly basically signed up for one of those engineering placements.
But then I looked at what else is out there. And I think the big four do some schemes, Accenture and the Bank of England even did a scheme. And I just had a look at those. And I thought that if nothing else, that'll give me different experiences. And yeah, I guess since then, I've been on the consulting train. But at that time, I wasn't really sure that I wanted to do consulting. I just thought it's a really great opportunity to work in the city and yet to have a very different experience to what I would normally have doing engineering.

**Aayush Sonthalia** (1:58)
And once you finished that at university subsequently, were you then convinced that consulting was the career path for you? Or did you explore other things as well, like a more pure engineering job, maybe your banking or something else, for example?

**Taariq Ismail** (2:11)
Funny enough, after the second Accenture internship, I thought this is a lot of fun, but it's not gonna be exactly what I wanna do.
And I started looking at engineering a bit more but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that wasn't actually what I wanted to do either. And then I actually had a conversation with somebody who worked in analytics at another consulting firm. And he described his job of doing a lot of modeling and a lot of very interesting, cool maths to try and find out the answer to a business problem. I think the example he gave was something like service and maintenance schedules for aircraft and trying to optimize them. And I thought, that's pretty interesting. And he was like, well, we spoke a bit about careers and stuff and we told him we haven't offered to go back to Accenture. And he said that that would be a perfect place to actually do it.
So actually, after exploring a bit, I realized that although traditional consulting may not have been the thing I wanted to do, there was this other door that had recently opened. And yeah, that's what I went for.

**Aayush Sonthalia** (3:17)
All right, so yeah, let's talk a bit more about the analytics side of things. For people who don't know what analytics is within a consulting context, what exactly is it that that is that you did at Accenture and how is it different from the typical consulting path that the majority of people go down?

**Taariq Ismail** (3:34)
So at Accenture, it's pretty fluid. So you could end up on an analytics projects. Everyone was put into one big group and then you could end up on different projects. But in a nutshell, analytics is using a bit more than like summary statistics and sample data to come up with an answer to a business problem. So I guess the business problem is always what you're solving for. You're not really solving the technical problem of how to compute a certain regression faster or whatever. It's more how can we use all of this data to come up with an answer that we may or may not have gotten to otherwise.