Hello everyone, I am Vineeth M, currently pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Bennett University, Greater Noida and am in my last semester.
In this article, I will be sharing my experience, working as a BTSA (Business Technology Solutions Associate) intern, based in the New Delhi office. I joined ZS in the last week of July, 2021 and its been 9 months as a BTSA intern.
We will be having an overview of the company, what ZS does, its interview process for internship, learning resources for your interview and my project experience. I am sure this article will be able to give you a glimpse at this amazing company.
Overview of the Company
“Our first customer is still our customer.” More than 90% of the work at ZS comes from returning customers. ZS is a global professional services firm that leverages deep industry expertise, leading edge analytics, strategy and technology to create real-world solutions for the clients.
ZS was founded in 1983 and in the first 3 years, ZS aided 8 of the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies. By 2011, ZS has partnered with 49 of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies and 17 of the top 20 medical device companies of the world.
Today ZS works with firms all around the world and in a variety of areas including healthcare, technology, financial services and more. ZS currently assists clients with everything from research to commercialization, as well as devises the strategy, analytics and technology required to create real-world solutions.
There are 30+ office locations worldwide, with Indian offices located in the cities of Pune, New Delhi and Bangalore.
My Interview Process
I’ll be sharing my interview experience which was an on-campus opportunity. The pattern of the interviews do keep changing, in my case there wasn’t any case study round. So I would recommend to stay updated with the latest hiring process.
There were 4 rounds:
- Online Assessment Round:
This is an online MCQ round. It had around 50 questions to be solved in 45 minutes. The questions revolved around Aptitude, DBMS and generic technical topics.
2. Technical Round 1:
It was a 30 to 45 minutes round which starts with an introduction, project discussion, conceptual questions on DBMS followed by problem solving in SQL. Usually they will ask you to write a SQL query for the given set of problems.
Towards the end, 2 to 3 puzzles are asked. It is advised to study them before your interviews from GeeksforGeeks (link). Sometimes it becomes quite tricky to find solutions to these puzzles when encountering them for the first time.
3. Technical Round 2:
This is again similar to Technical Round 1 and there would be more hands-on problem solving in SQL / python. Most of the times and for me it was SQL but for some of my friends it was in python as well. Be sure to practice SQL well (use of subqueries, different types of joins, aliasing, window functions etc.).
Again this round ends with 2 to 3 puzzles, in my opinion they want to judge your problem solving skills as in how you approach such tricky problems in a systematic way, kind of assumptions you make etc.
4. HR Fitment Round:
This is one of the major deciding round, it is taken by a manager at ZS. There would be an in-depth project discussion, lots of theoretical questions from DBMS and SQL are asked. One of the key aspect of this round is the behavioral based questions. There is no need to prepare for these things, just be honest and answer to the point. It is more about engaging with a manager over one friendly conversation. This is perhaps the easiest thing as if you are talking to some friend. So don’t take stress, if you reached till this round just relax and go with an open mind to engage in a friendly conversation. There is absolutely no need to mug-up fancy lines etc.
Towards the end there would be some puzzles and the best way to answer them is to first understand what the puzzle is asking and what needs to be figured out. Usually most of the puzzles require you to actually think less and stress of the basic foundations. There is no need to blow your mind by assuming complex solutions, it is pretty straightforward. First you can state any assumptions that you are going to make, state some basic facts and reach to the solution. My suggestion would be to actually take a small pause and think if the solution you are proposing is correct or is there any other solution that makes more sense.
Why I am saying this is because sometimes we straight away point to a particular solution thinking the puzzle is pretty straightforward. There would be a slight twist, so always double check before finalizing your solution.
I basically had my Technical Round-2 and HR Fitment Round on the same day with a gap of around 2 hours. Post the last round, I received the selection intimation from my placement team.
The onboarding experience
The onboarding process at ZS is very smooth and it accompanies with a 3 day orientation session where some foundational courses are provided along with various sessions where there would be lots of insights about how ZS works, its culture, how the payroll system works etc.
One of the best sessions was the one named What is your ZS Story ? where people who have worked for a significant amount of time at ZS, share their journey.
I believe such events will create a high motivation amongst the new joiners and fills them with passion to learn new things and give their best.
During the first month of every quarter, the learning team sends out a learning calendar which includes courses, learning roadmaps and various sessions, across the different tracks and levels, that one can attend to upskill themselves.
I am pretty sure all the doubts, no matter how small or big, will all be clarified with the help of these sessions. The learning team and the HRs are super useful and friendly and they will be communicating all the links, resources, timelines etc.
This usually is followed by the project staffing and then a month of Bootcamp.
The Bootcamp
The Bootcamp is usually conducted for a duration of 3 to 4 weeks where there is a neatly collated resources for learning concepts of:
- SDLC And Agile Methodology
- Data Warehousing
- Unix and Shell Scripting
- Python
- AWS
- SQL
- Tableau
Having foundational knowledge of these will be great for a smooth start at ZS. There are mentor connects for doubts resolution. Post these learning sessions, teams of size 4 to 5 members are created and you are provided with raw data files to build a complete dashboard from scratch. There would be a proper case study and all the client requirements will be stated there. There are dedicated mentors allotted to a team and indeed this is one of a true hands-on learning experience. Step by Step guidelines are provided so that you don’t get stuck.
Towards the end, there would be a connect with a PAM member (Principal / Associate Principal / Manager) who will be hearing out your presentation and will be providing their invaluable feedback which will be your stepping stone for the actual projects you will be working on in ZS.
ZS Core values
A company’s culture is in a constant state of evolution while its values make up the foundation. The 3 core values of ZS are:
- Do the right thing.
- Treat people right.
- Get it right.
These are the values that are inculcated in the day to day work and hence you will find people with senior roles super-friendly and approachable. Despite being an intern, my views and suggestions were always taken into account and to be honest I was involved in the projects as if I was a full-time employee. For me this was the most important thing as this led to an ever increasing learning / growth curve for me.
My Experience
I was staffed in the data management and reporting team for a pharma based client. There were lots of KT (Knowledge Transfer) session to give background information of the pharma terminology and business context. This is one of the most essentials skills to acquire when working in a consulting firm. It is not just the tech skills that matter, the business context as in the knowledge and awareness of why we are building a particular report, applying certain set of filters etc. enables us to work in a more efficient manner.
After a few KT sessions, my team used to conduct reverse KT sessions. I remember having a reverse KT session for SQL, wherein I was supposed to teach my team SQL and then they will be asking questions to judge my current skills. Towards the end of the session, the team will provide feedback on my current skillset, further topics to learn/practice etc. Based on this some additional KT sessions with a person having expertise in that area was then scheduled.
All in all, I want to emphasize on the point that team focuses a lot on interns and they ensure you get all the required resources and support to speed up your learning and development project.
The team members are super-supportive and will take out their time to teach you stuff and provide proper guidance.
I was involved in the daily morning and evening project calls, and from an intern standpoint, your views and suggestions are always welcome. They will be giving you responsibility and ownership of work, this is the special thing of ZS, that as an intern you will be working on real-world projects and not some dummy projects for your learning purpose. This enables the interns realize the fact that they are contributing to the project right from the start.
My Projects and Tech Stack
I started with the Data Management and reporting team where I was working on fixing data issues in the code as well as creating backend SQL codes, used for the various Reporting Dashboards. I made use of Oracle, Tableau and Qlik Sense for the same.
Apart from the above tech skills, I learnt how to communicate and engage effectively in client meetings, draft concise emails, work collaboratively in a team etc. These are few of the things which improved my personality, time management and communication skills.
After that I was staffed on an AI-ML project, where I started working on building the project right from the start. It started with the selection of the datasets, brainstorming the features to be built, creating various algorithms, feature creation, model creation, feature selection, model interpretation etc.
This was my favorite project and was indeed an awesome learning experience. We were using snowflake and the databricks platform for coding this project out in Python and PySpark.
Post this project, I started working in one platform migration project- Qlik to Power BI. In this I was a part of the backend data modeling team, where our aim was to understand the data model used in Qlik with data coming from Oracle and try to build the optimized version of the same in Power BI with the data coming from Snowflake.
This required understanding the context of the dashboard, various database objects and the relations between them. This project was more heavy on the SQL side. But the best part is the client meetings to understand the data. The perks of creating a data model for a particular dashboard from scratch is that it gives important insights into the kind of data that is used, the business context and the type of audience the dashboard caters to. This enhances the business understanding and articulating the kind of data required to build dashboards for clients, how to optimize them, how to make it more user friendly etc.
Concluding Statements
In my opinion, ZS is one of the finest technology consulting firm, where there is an awesome work culture and a great learning curve. I used to have weekly mentor connects where I could share my weekly progress and discuss any issues that I might be having.
The team is super-supportive and they will be providing you with a lot of documents, recordings, courses etc. to help to get started on the project comfortably.
On of the best thing about the daily team calls is that all your doubts, roadblocks could be cleared. Via these calls you can have a better sense of the daily progress of the project and how the development is done step by step.
There are lot of fun sessions conducted to increase the team bonding, so it’s not always work, work and work. I am indeed very lucky to have worked with such an amazing team. I was able to work with the offshore teams in US and this indeed greatly improved my communication skills. I was able to connect and network with a lot of amazing people. In short, I would really recommend someone passionate in the field of data management, reporting, analytics and data science to apply at ZS and experience this amazing work culture.
Glimpse of the kind of work done
When working for a pharma based client, one of the most important thing is understanding of the pharma terminology, the client understanding, market understanding, data sources etc. From a technical standpoint, there needs to be a place to store structured data, for this we may be using Oracle, Snowflake and other databases. Once the raw data is ingested, next step is to create views to be used for general purposes or the creation of dashboard specific views. SQL is commonly used for writing these backend codes. A good understanding of SQL would be helpful.
On top of these data we create dashboards for the client’s field user and leadership teams, using the various reporting tools like Tableau, QlikSense, Power BI etc. Learning these skills is really fun, building the data models, workflows, visualizations etc. gives a much better understanding of how the numbers are crunched to create meaningful visualizations for a clear and easy understanding of the end users.
Data analytics is more about exploring the various insights and trends from the underlying data, model relationships between the various data sources and create easy to comprehend visualizations, so that the clients can easily understand what the complex numbers are trying to imply. Making complex backend calculations easy to comprehend and user-friendly to interact with, is one of the important skill to master.
There is a common saying, the more expertise one gains, the simpler their explanation becomes.
Then there is a lot of testing that needs to be done, UATs (User Acceptance Testing), client feedback etc. Apart from the reporting part, there are cross platform based migration projects, AI projects where some model needs to be built using Machine Learning or Deep Learning.
In AI projects, first the data sources are taken into consideration which is followed by a brainstorming session where the input features are created. We don’t really dump the native columns coming from a database table to the model directly. We need to create various meaningful features using some logic, for example: calculating compliance score from the therapy shipment data. This part requires a lot of brainstorming as ultimately the model will be making predictions given these features as the input.
Post this we perform EDA to pre-process the data, then build the model, fine-grain it, do feature selection, retrain model, deploy and monitor the model in production. Building ETL (Extract Transform Load) pipelines, creating business rules etc.
All in all this was just a glimpse at how data reporting and analytics project looks like when viewed from an eagle’s eye. There is a plethora of things which exist in reality and everyday is indeed a new learning experience.
In short the role of BTSA (Business Technology Solutions Associate) is to enable technology based solutions for the client and in ZS you will be experience it from the moment you join this firm 💯.
