Jeff Aalto

After getting out of grad school with my MBA in Finance, I began my career teaching hedge fund associates, asset managers, investment bankers, private equity associates and the like how to use my company’s web tool and excel plugin for financial modeling. Over the next 15 years, I worked as the Manager of Business Analytics leading a team of 3 and migrating analytics from excel to increasingly more technical solutions using SAS, Analysis Services and other tools and then moved to Consulting where I built Analytics solutions in the cloud learning new technologies to tackle more and more challenging problems. The past 5 years I’ve spent mastering the Azure data environment while helping countless junior technical professionals improve their skills on the job and deliver solutions that align with industry best practices.

When I’m working with people, I encourage them to be curious about what we are trying to learn and why it’s useful to gain that understanding. I encourage them to break problems down into the smallest parts possible and gain understanding of what purpose each step has and what scenarios are handled. I’m trying to teach a thought process and approach that enables people to think their way through the next slightly different problem that they are faced with and not just the one problem in front of them now.

The greatest joy that I get is when I see someone I’ve been working with take the next step, seeing a new issue and developing a solution that takes the next step beyond the patterns of the past to apply a new way of getting to the answer. Technology will never be more than an ever expanding tool belt, and an ability to correctly learn and marry the capability of the tools to the problems in front of you is far more valuable than being able to consistently mimic a pattern for a narrow use case without real understanding.