Rakshit Vig: VIT Engineer, Ex-PwC Consultant, Data Mentor to 20,000+ Students

Rakshit Vig is a data science and analytics professional and a data mentor at Jobaaj Learnings who has trained more than 20,000 students in live workshops and personally trained close to a thousand. He splits his time between a full-time data role on weekdays and mentoring on weekends.

Education and qualifications

Rakshit was born in Agra and studied at St Claire's Sr. Sec. School there, where he was active in dance and oratory. After 10th, he spent two years preparing for JEE Mains, then repeated his 12th to improve his score and attempt JEE again. In 2014, he enrolled at VIT, Vellore, in Electronics and Communication Engineering.

In college he was vice-captain of SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space). The team competed at CANSAT in the US in 2016 and returned in 2017 to place 2nd, an achievement covered by The Times of India. In his final year, 2018, he published a research report on an "Autonomous Book Sorter System". His college interests centred on robotics, embedded systems and public speaking.

Work experience

After graduating, Rakshit joined PwC as a consultant. His major client there was PepsiCo, where he built end-to-end data analytics solutions: extracting data from cloud databases, website traffic, analytics tools and CRMs, and turning it into data-driven recommendations on business decisions. His toolkit included Power BI, Tableau, SQL and Python. Alongside his PwC job, he gave tuitions in parallel.

He later left PwC and joined a more data-focused company. His current work includes analysing customer journey data across a client's website (clicks, downloads and other touchpoints) to recommend retargeting and UX improvements, coordinating with tech, marketing and sales teams and presenting findings to management. Projects run from a week to several months depending on the problem.

Mentoring experience

Around March 2022, a friend heading a pan-India ed-tech approached Rakshit to share his experience with students, which led to his mentoring role at Jobaaj Learnings. He runs live, hands-on workshops on using data to drive business decisions. He has trained over 20,000 students online, personally oversees the training of nearly a thousand, and has had close to 1,000 students attend a single live workshop. Several of his students have gone on to data roles at large companies.

Approach to work

Rakshit advises beginners to build a personalised roadmap based on their background: those from tech should prioritise the mathematics and statistics behind data, while those from finance should focus on programming fundamentals, SQL, data visualisation and data literacy. Regardless of background, he considers Excel the mandatory first step, and recommends moving on only once someone can confidently handle large datasets in it.