New Home: Belgium

FullStack Development

In August 2021, I embarked on a 6-month course and successfully completed it by February 2022. This experience led to a short-term internship in an agile environment at Mediconsult, a pharmaceutical IT company. Together with my team, we developed a noteworthy capstone project enabling sports facility bookings. The project was mostly written with React, using the MERN stack. As part of this project, I was mostly responsible for the FrontEnd. I was tasked with creating several pages, including authentification pages, rooms catalog, single room details, booking confirmation, thank you page, and others. To prepare the design and directly import css, I was actively working with Figma for this project. All-in-all, this FullStack developer program at the University of Turku in Finland helped me to gain a job in the field of web/digital marketing before I even graduated! That's how I appeared in a sports betting company: Magic Betting.

Sports Digital Marketing

The year started with a new challenge: I took the role of marketing data analyst in a sports betting company in Belgium. Luckily, both colleagues and bosses turned out to be very supportive. To be fair, that was a big contrast with the Finnish working environments I was used to. In terms of work atmosphere, the sports betting company I work for Magic Betting appeared to be a really great place to work.

My original role in the company was to prepare analytical reports for marketing efforts. That included working with a variety of marketing tools: Facebook ads, Apple ads, Android ads, Google Ads, and Income Access. I learned a bunch of Google suite tools, including Google Analytics 4 (GA4) through Google Tag Manager (GTM) setup and integrations to Unbounce landing pages, WordPress subdomain websites, as well as custom code websites, such as my own website. I also found a way to aggregate reports from those tools in Google Data Studio and connected Funnel. Ultimately, the main value of my work was to clean, analyze, and visualize the data using MS Excel and/or Google Sheets. By the end of the year, I also started to actively learn PowerBI to make visualizations.

Overall, within 2022, I learned to create reporting for the complete marketing mix, using Excel Pivot tables, Power Queries, and Macros with VBA. In addition, I practiced preparing weekly and monthly KPI reports, which help to track the company's performance in short- (8 weeks) and long-term (year-to-date) perspectives. I also create nice-looking dashboards in Excel and PowerBI, which are completely automated. That means no additional work is needed to update the dashboard after the business KPI reports are updated with the most recent data from the previous week. All-in-all, I am proud that my work helped the company to double its profits and active customer base by the end of 2022.

Football Coaching

I rapidly gained a significant amount of information about football coaching in 2021. To stricture this information, I created the presentation: "Refreshment for football coaching: UEFA C level". After the presentation was created, it was necessary to test the theory in practice. Thus, my year 2022 started with the search for a football club where I could continue coaching.

This process went crazy fast: I moved from Louvain-la-Neuve to Leuven in May 2022. I directly applied for the job of a football coach in the junior academy of OHL (the club's first team is performing in the highest league of Belgian football). Within 2 months, I was already confirmed to work as a head football coach of U11 Regional. That was a great opportunity to test my theoretical knowledge in practice! Based on my coaching experience in-between August and December 2022, I created an Excel file with my season plan for football training sessions. Check it out below: