Chuhan Peng - Senior Analyst Engineer
Chuhan describes her career journey from Henley into the rapidly evolving world of Digital Business.
Why did you become a Senior Analytics Engineer?
I started my career in data as a data analyst, which I genuinely enjoyed, but over time I realised I was always drawn to the building side of things. Analytics engineering sits between data engineering and data analysis, you are essentially building the data infrastructure and data models that the rest of the business relies on to make decisions. I'm naturally a hands-on person and when I discovered this role, I knew that was the perfect fit for me, as it gave me the technical rigour of engineering and business impact of analytics.
What do you enjoy most about it?
What really excites me about my current role is the variety of work. On any given day I might be ingesting data and building robust pipelines, designing data models that analysts use to build dashboards and data scientists use to train machine learning models, or setting code standards that improve the developer experience across the wider data team. I'm not just consuming data, but building the infrastructure that makes everyone else's work possible, that feels meaningful to me.
What are the challenges and opportunities in the Digital field right now?
The biggest thing on everyone's mind right now is AI. We're moving from a world where we do everything to one where AI does the work and we act as the architect, articulating the problem and orchestrating the outcome. That's a huge opportunity, but of course it's also daunting, because it forces you to think: what does my role look like in a few years? I think the people who will thrive are those who lean into that question and make effective use of AI. That's an essential skill for anyone entering this field right now.
Do you have any advice to students wanting a career in Digital?
Stay curious, AI may be able to replace the doing, but the real differentiator now is your curiosity to find interesting problems worth solving. Be a generalist, don't box yourself in early. The more you understand across technical and business domains, the more adaptable you become.
How did your Henley Masters help you on your career journey?
One of the modules I took was Business Data Analytics taught by Dr Markos Kyritsis, it's one of my favourites, as it gave me a strong statistical foundation and hands on coding experience that was particularly helpful in my early data career. Equally valuable was Henley's career centre. As an international student navigating an unfamiliar job market, having supportive staff help with my CV and mock interviews really made a big difference.
MSc Digital Business and Data Analytics
This Masters programme prepares you to transform data within information-rich enterprises, supporting career aspirations such as a data analyst or information manager.