Sigma Labs hosted a data engineering hackathon on Thursday 23^rd May at Plexal at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London.

Bringing together 150 professionals from 13 leading brands, the event saw 17 teams, formed of four to six data engineers and analysts, tasked with building a cloud-hosted data product to boost audience engagement in this summer’s Paris Olympics.

We were delighted to have Team GB Olympic performance psychologist Katie Mobed and Olympic rugby player Tom Mitchell overseeing the event, with an expert panel of chief data officers from John Lewis, Zurich, Diageo and Merlin judging the entries.

According to our Tech and the Boardroom survey, 30% of C-suite professionals are keen to learn more about the long-term implications of data to help them understand market trends and make better decisions for their business. Data science and analytics is also a core talent pain point for 19% of boardroom leaders.

This means events like this are particularly important, as Rich Lewis Jones, CEO of Sigma Labs, explained:“Data is a significant priority for businesses, yet many still lack data experts,” he said. “Our Olympics-themed hackathon showcased the power of data engineering for businesses, bringing together data analysts and scientists in a high-performance environment to raise audience engagement. Sigma Labs is focused on training candidates with high-performance behaviours to thrive in data and software roles and this hackathon was a great showcase of that.”

Many thanks to our participants from John Lewis Partnership, Linklaters, Mars, Burberry, Asda, Ogilvy, HSBC, Reach PLC, Capital One, Digital Intelligence, MS Amlin, News UK and Zurich – and congratulations to our winning team, Ogilvy!

Sigma Labs trains outstanding graduates to be top performing consultants in data and software engineering before hiring them directly and deploying them in industry. You can find out more about Sigma Labs here.