Some people have a solid career path mapped out from day one

Pin It

Others aren’t so sure, and follow what appeals to them at the time. Others, like me, are even more clueless. Mine was less a career path than a series of accidents taking me on a completely random route with no map.

Convinced I was going to be a classical musician I took the relevant O and A level courses to get me to a good university to study music. Until I decided that I wasn’t really talented enough to be a professional musician and drifted into college to take a business studies course (in the absence of a plan B). Nope. Not for me. I got a job as a Trainee Manageress at a local department store but ended up staying on at a temporary job in the Engineer’s Department I was doing in the meantime.

Despite enjoying the novelty of being a woman in a man’s world, after a couple of years I realised that being a Civil Engineering Technician really wasn’t for me.
Again, there was no plan B, C or D. In fact, no plan at all.

I went for a job at a children’s home, and within a week moved from being a pioneering woman in a man’s world to doing a stereotypically female job – looking after children.

However, I loved this work. I stayed in the field of residential child care for many years, gaining a professional social work qualification and rising through the ranks. The work was challenging and hard but I loved it. I particularly loved the diversity of the children in our care – each one unique and having different backgrounds, needs and aspirations.

In the meantime I had married, and then became pregnant with my first child. I didn’t want to work shifts with a young baby so I threw myself into full time motherhood for a short while.

Then I was invited to the retirement party of the woman who had trained me during my qualification and was invited to apply for her job. I successfully applied and worked one day a week training other social workers doing their professional qualifications, and the role grew to include other training-related tasks. By the time I had my second child the role had grown.

I talked to my manager about what I might do after this child was born, and he recommended I set up as a freelance trainer. It seemed both ridiculous and exciting and was something I could do around my children’s timetables. In those first few years I recognised there were lots of gaps in my knowledge, and put myself through a Further Education Teaching Certificate, a post graduate Diploma in Training Management and then, as the children got older, through a Masters degree in Human Resource Development.

More by accident than design, the management report I wrote for the Diploma was around gender issues, and the dissertation I wrote for the Masters degree was around anti-racism in the public sector. The latter was published in an academic textbook, and all of a sudden I was seen as an “expert” in diversity issues, which led to much more work in that field. I was divorced by this time so the work was very welcome!

I continued as an independent trainer, working mostly with public sector bodies helping them look at how they could meet the needs of a diverse range of staff and customers. Much of my work was around race, gender and, ironically, disability. I loved this work. Being self-employed I could work around the constraints of being a single parent, and the work was varied and interesting. I had finally found the career I wanted to keep until I retired.

However, in 2004 a damaged spine and failed spinal surgery meant I could no longer continue to earn my living this way. I alternated between feeling very sorry for myself and writing a business plan. I knew the public sector inside out, and I knew about training.

So in 2005 I set up a public sector training company and Public Sector Providers was born which I ran from home. Amazingly, the business soon grew to a point where I needed more hands on deck, so came the big leap of taking on staff and premises. Within a couple of years we had three staff, thirty trainers and a number of contracts. We put on regular national conferences (with speakers like Germaine Greer – who was wonderful!) and the business was ticking along very nicely. The biggest challenge was there being so many tenders to go for that even with a colleague and me working on them all the time we were missing many opportunities.

Thanks to a brainstorming session with a group of friends and fellow business people we came up with the idea of raising investment to grow the business. I found a number of small investors and some Business Angels (through doing “Dragon’s Den” type pitches, which I thoroughly enjoyed!). We raised enough money to employ more staff and do more marketing activities.

The growth was challenged by an unprecedented global financial crisis (and its impact on public sector spending) and me becoming much more severely disabled through further failed spinal surgery. We managed to find some ways round my disability (as blogged elsewhere) and mitigate against the public sector spending cuts by offering related services to the private sector. Two new trading arms were set up, and we are already delivering accredited management development programmes to a number of private sector companies.

Although it may appear that little can be learnt from this bumbling series of random events leading from being an aspiring musician/engineer/social worker and trainer through to finding myself running (albeit from a lying down position) a small limited company complete with fellow directors, shareholders, staff, offices and a team of consultants, I have learnt much. Including:

1.Learn, learn, learn. About your trade, about your customers, about your team, about your competitors. About leading edge thinkers in your field. Suck in as much knowledge as you can.

2.Expect things to change. Usually at the most inconvenient moment.

3.Some things that look like disasters turn out to be opportunities. Some things that look like opportunities turn out to be disasters. But sometimes opportunities and disasters really are what they seem.

4.The greatest benefit in business is to know your own limitations and find other people who can fill those gaps. Then nurture those people like crazy!

5.Recognise that talent can be found in the most unexpected of places.

6.Ask the advice of those who know more about some stuff than you do. And listen to them! But listen with ears that can put that advice into the context of other advice and everything else you know about your business.

7.There will be times when you over-estimate your skills and talents. And far more times when you underestimate your resilience and creativity.

8.When people trot out the well-worn cliché about people being the most important assets of a business, they are 100% correct. Whether colleagues, competitors, suppliers, shareholders, clients – people are who will make or break the business. Look after your people.

9.Business is about selling what people want to them for enough money to make a profit. So simple, but not so simple after all.

10.I need to listen to my own advice ….

Jane

About Special Guest
Birds on the Blog welcomes Guest Bloggers of all abilities, if you have something to say and you wish to share it with us - get in touch
View all posts by Special Guest →