Tag: careers

208: so, what do you want to be when you grow up?

So here we are at week 208 – four years of me rambling (physically and literarily), reading, making stuff, working, swimming and anything else that’s taken my fancy., Happy birthday to WKDN once again. 11,688 people have visited my little corner of the internet, which is pretty cool – thank you, especially to those people who drop in every week to see what I’ve been up to. Some of them aren’t even related to me!

Does this make me a writer of sorts? There’s certainly been a lot of words. 214,103 to be exact. Some of them have been quite cross and some of them have been airyfairy and about mushrooms and flowers and things, and a lot of them have been about various crafts. Some of them may even have made people think about things differently – I hope so, at least.

At one point in my life I wanted to be a writer, but the trouble was I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, and as it turned out I accidentally fell into a career I rather liked so that worked out quite well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about careers recently thanks to a couple of events I’ve taken part in: one for Year 10s with Inspire, our local Education Business Partnership, and one for undergraduate Education Studies students at the University of East London, but both aimed at helping various levels of students think about their career choices post-education. I’ve just signed up to the latter’s professional mentoring programme, in fact.

When I do these events we’re always asked to talk about our ‘career paths’ and in the last year or so there’s been a focus on non-traditional paths to the workplace – less of the narrow academic routes and more about apprenticeships, traineeships. Definitely less of the ‘I got 3 A*, went to Oxbridge/insert Russell Group uni of choice, got the job of my dreams and now I have a house, 2.4 kids and a dog called Volvo’ career path. I do see some of those people still around – one engineer telling students that they have to do a degree or they won’t get a job, for example, which in the middle of a white working class council estate in depressed post-Ford Dagenham isn’t really the most helpful advice in these days of student debt.

I was on a panel the other day with someone doing youth work and marketing, and he was really open about the fact that he’d dropped out of university having made a mess of his first year, and his dad made him get a job. The job turned out to be in youth work, and he loved it – so he went back to uni with a purpose and now is doing amazing things. He also had an excellent hat.

Another event saw me talking to an environmental scientist who wishes she’d gone down the apprenticeship route as she’d have entered the workplace with practical experience rather than a lot of theory. Her job, on the Tideway Tunnel project, seems mostly to involve telling the construction workers off for throwing mitten crabs back in the river.

The panel event at UEL was essentially for opening up the students’ horizons about the different careers in education: as well as the marketing youth worker, there was a teacher and someone who works in outreach in the Home Office. I always like to describe my career as accidental, as the move out of teaching came as a result of an Inset Day arranged (coincidentally) by the very EBP I did the school event with a few weeks ago. I like these circular moments.

We inevitably get asked at some point what advice we’d give to people starting out, and mine is invariably to take every opportunity you can as you’ll always learn something useful. A range of handy teaching skills, for example, actually came from working behind a bar and clearing people out at closing time. Be curious about all the people around you and what they’re doing – getting the whole picture of an organisation helps you work as a team, and builds relationships. I mean everyone, from the cleaners upwards – make friends, ask them how they are. No one is too low or too high to say hello to. Play nicely, and – this is my current office bugbear – always put your cups and teaspoons in the dishwasher.

Other things making me happy this week

  • Interesting online meetings about working with young volunteers and Bradford City of Culture
  • A surprise birthday breakfast for Rachel at the lake after a chilly swim
  • Good progress on the current cross stitch
  • Visit from Timeshare Teenager 2 and Grandthing 2
  • Coffee and world-righting with Amanda
  • Still watching Silent Witness. We’re up to series 15!
  • A visit to the Foundling Museum with a colleague
Courtroom ceiling at the Foundling

Same time next week then 🙂

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Rules of Magic/Magic Lessons/The Book of Magic – Alice Hoffman

The Wild Rover – Mike Parker

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Killing the Shadows – Val McDermid

118: what do you want to be when you grow up?

This week I was invited to be part of an event at New City College’s Epping Forest campus, which is where Thing 1 is going in September to study Theatrical, Special Effects, Hair and Media Make-up. She has a plan: she wants to do this A-level equivalent qualification and then wants to be apprenticed to a tattoo artist. It’ll use her art skills, she enjoys it and there are a number of career routes she can go down after this. University is not for everyone, and if that’s the route she wants to take then my job is to support her (I may draw the line at being a tester for mad make up though). I had no clue what I wanted to do at 16 (I was 29 by the time I worked it out) so this sort of plan is pretty impressive.

The event was a business breakfast followed by a speed-dating style mock interview session with some of the students, which I always enjoy as I’m really nosy I like interviewing people. It was also an opportunity for me to network with the curriculum managers whose courses the museum could be supporting. We discussed cultural capital, which has slipped down the priority list even further since Covid. I have already been in to the college a few times to work with the childcare students about learning through play, and a few years back I spoke to the Skills for Life group about careers.

Organised by Jill, the Industry Placements and Work Experience Manager for the New City College group, the breakfast and interviews were a great event where I got to meet an adorable wedding and bespoke evening dress designer, a local policeman, people from the local secondary schools, people from a nursery franchise who have worked with my beloved for years, an ex-policeman now specialising in safeguarding and business development, and a transformational life coach (OK, this was my friend Miriam) as well as others.

I met lots of students, too – well, 12 of them, as we each saw three students in each ‘speed’ session. We’d been given a set of questions in three sections, and the plan was that with the first student we’d ask questions from the first section (the usual ‘why this role/why you’ queries); with the second question and student we’d ask them more about themselves; and the third student would be asked questions about career and ambition. None of the students had any idea they were about to be subjected to this, and had been dragged kicking and screaming (or at least slouching and mumbling) from their learning rooms.

We had a real mix of abilities and courses: childcare and cabin crew in the first session; drama and Skills for Life in session two; and business and IT in sessions three and four. Some of the students were clear, confident and launched into the spirit of things. One of the cabin crew students made me laugh (internally of course) when I asked her what she’d do if a customer arrived who was late for check in and was being quite forceful: her immediate reaction was ‘call security’ and if – and only if – the customer apologised to her properly then she’d talk to them. Then she told me that the most important skill needed in the cabin crew role was communication and customer service. Bless. The business students all wanted to do events management, as they’d clearly just had a module on this, and the IT students just wanted to lurk in a basement and solve people’s problems remotely (why yes, The IT Crowd was actually a documentary, didn’t you know?).

Based on a true story?

My favourite group were the Skills for Life students, many of whom needed a lot of encouragement to come and talk to us. Jill brought me a particularly anxious one with a ‘come and talk to my friend Kirsty, she’s lovely’. The student, A, was so clearly uncomfortable that I set aside the questions and we just had a chat: A told me that they didn’t know what they wanted to do, but they really loved video games and drawing. Their parents had told them that this was rubbish and they’d never get a job doing that, so we talked about all the different aspects of game design (storyboarding, writing, artwork, sound design etc) that weren’t coding and I told them about Rex Crowle and his career in game design. I asked them if they’d heard about Big Creative Education who do game design courses as well as other creative skills, and then at the end of the session I introduced them to another lovely person rather than leave them floundering. I made a point of speaking to them at the end of the session, giving them the web address of BCE, and suggesting they looked at the journey planner on TfL.

I spent some time after meeting A fuming quietly about people who don’t support their kids: it’s really hard to remember at times, but our dreams are not theirs.

Me.

Another student from this group, E, was also brought over to me. Her passion was drag shows, which she travels all over the country to see, and she wanted to be a make up artist because of this. She had no idea about the theatrical and special effects make up course, so I signposted that and suggested she spoke to her tutors about it. We didn’t do any interview questions, but both A and E went away feeling reassured and having broken through a barrier about talking to unknown adults.

Miriam and I debriefed over lunch at Fresko in Debden Broadway and put the world to rights before heading home for an afternoon of meetings, an evening mercy dash bearing coffee to Harlow, and ferrying the kids to Scouts where Thing 3 managed to get covered in tie dye despite wearing an apron.

Things making me happy this week:

  • the epilogue for the last D&D campaign
  • building my character for the next campaign
  • a cool pool on very hot days
  • fresh strawberries, loganberries and raspberries from the garden
  • watching the parakeets
  • the 11 degree drop in the bedroom temperature last night! The cats were also grateful (see a melted Lulu in this week’s cover image)
  • more excellent course feedback
  • making jewellery for the school fete
  • tiny coot chicks cheeping on the lake this morning

See you next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

A Question of Identity/The Soul of Discretion/The Comforts of Home/The Benefit of Hindsight- Susan Hill

The Midnight Hour – Elly Griffiths