ExploreAI Podcast

Carmen is head of curriculum at ExploreAI Academy. Carmen pursued a path of technical training with BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees in electrical and mechatronic engineering. Her academic research focussed largely on education and how technical subjects like engineering are taught most effectively. 

Jaco is head of the ExploreAI Academy. He's an out-and-out academic with BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering, an MBA, and nearly 10 years of experience at South Africa's acclaimed CSIR, the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research.

Aidan is the CTO at ExploreAI. He is an actuary by training, and before joining ExploreAI in 2015 spent much of his career as a management consultant. His diverse interests led him to London for many years and to places like Korea, where he dabbled in martial arts and which inspired ExploreAI Academy's belt system. 

Shaun Dippnall is the founder, chairman, and former CEO of ExploreAI. Shaun hails from humble beginnings and made good use of his affinity for maths from an early age. He was chief actuary at a large bank in his mid-20s, and went on to be a management consultant to some of South Africa's biggest corporates. At 35, he founded EXPLORE and its Data Science Academy – what we know affectionately today as ExploreAI.

Pete is the head of partnerships for ExploreAI Academy and formerly the Academy's head of growth. He was instrumental in landing ExploreAI's landmark partnership with ALX. His career, which started with a degree in actuarial science, has spanned a corporate tenure at a large South African bank, as well as a stint working in operations for a church, before landing at ExploreAI in 2022.

In this episode, we talk to ExploreAI Academy alum David Labuschagne, the placements lead and soon-to-be B2B sales lead at ExploreAI. We discuss Dave's journey from studying economics, becoming a game ranger, studying data science, and ultimately working in placements and sales. We delve into the common mistakes graduates make as they enter the job market, how culture in the workplace has been affected by the move to remote working, how rejections in sales teach different approaches to deal with failure, and how Dave optimises for 'Doing well by doing good'. To learn more about ExploreAI, visit our website at explore.ai, and follow us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/explore-ai

Jonathan Dankers is a data engineer, and Kieran Donnelly is a marketing manager, both at ExploreAI.  In this episode, Jonathan and Kieran discuss their backgrounds and how they got into the data industry, including Kieran's role at ExploreAI and Jonathan's experience as a data engineer and civil engineer before that.  They discuss Jonathan's experience as a student in ExploreAI Academy's data science course in 2020 and how he's used data in his daily tasks since starting at ExploreAI.  We learn about how Kieran started out making the course's video content and how it's progressed to the extremely high production standards it's at today.  They also discuss what ExploreAI calls their flywheel, or the cycle of ExploreAI's consulting business solving business problems for enterprise, and how their learnings are fed back to the Academy to inform the course content.  To learn more about ExploreAI, visit explore.ai, and follow us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/explore-ai