Inclusive Growth Show
Inclusive Growth Show
Career Pivots: Embracing change and creating opportunities
Discover the secrets to successfully pivoting your career and enhancing workplace inclusivity in this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. Join me, Toby Mildon, as I share my transformative journey from a technologist at the BBC to a diversity and inclusion specialist at Deloitte, before founding my own consultancy. Alongside me is Iesha Small, a dynamic career pivot consultant, who brings their rich experience of transitioning from mechanical engineering to teaching and later to coaching leaders. Together, we unravel the motivations and strategies behind our career changes, offering you practical advice on leveraging side hustles, personal projects, and the power of networking.
Iesha and I dissect the concept of career pivoting, shedding light on the challenges and rewards that come with significant professional shifts. From understanding the intricacies of coaching in educational leadership to exploring the creation of compelling professional portfolios, we share first-hand stories and actionable tips to guide you through your own career transitions. Iesha's journey from teaching to career coaching exemplifies how varied experiences can shape a unique approach to helping others. We emphasize the importance of personal branding, structured support, and aligning your career with personal values to navigate complex career landscapes.
Lastly, we delve into the entrepreneurial mindset and how viewing your career as a business can revolutionise your professional journey. Learn how to build confidence, especially if you're in your 40s or 50s, and how to utilise personal branding to open new opportunities. We also discuss the challenges of networking in today's world and offer solutions to stay connected. By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with a treasure trove of strategies and insights to help you pivot your career and foster inclusivity in your workplace. Connect with Iesha on LinkedIn for further guidance and resources.
If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website.
If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.
Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon Future-proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.
Speaker 2:Hey there, thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon and I'm really excited today to be joined by Ayesha Small, because today we're going to be talking about career pivoting. This is something I did myself, actually. So when I left university, I worked in technology. I was an IT consultant for Accenture. I then moved over to another company to work in healthcare technology and ended up at the BBC as a technical project manager working in user experience and design on the development of the BBC News website and the development of what is now known as the BBC Sounds app, as well as working on lots of accessibility projects.
Speaker 2:And I pivoted my career at the BBC because I used to work really closely with the senior leadership team within our technology department and they were concerned at the time about the gender imbalance that we had in tech. So we had about 14% of our workforce were women in technology compared to the rest of the BBC where we had a bit more of a 50-50 gender split across the rest of the corporation. So the senior leadership team created a plan to attract and recruit and retain more women in technology and engineering roles and, to cut a long story short. They needed a project manager to execute the plan. I put my hand up to do it and it started off as a part-time role, one day a week, and I quickly realized that this was not possible to do as a one day a week role, and then I managed to turn it into a full-time occupation, after which I then moved over to Deloitte as an in-house diversity and inclusion manager before setting up my own consultancy company.
Speaker 2:So my career pivot was going from being a technologist over to working as a diversity and inclusion specialist. So I'm really interested to catch up with Ayesha today to explore what career pivoting is and how you can do it if you are interested in pivoting your career. Lots of people do say to me you know, how do I get into a diversity and inclusion role, how do I pivot into that kind of role, and so it'd be quite interesting to get some official advice from an expert. So, aisha, it's lovely to see you. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Hey, toby, lovely to meet you, and it's funny hearing yourself described as an expert, because I'm like oh, am I an expert? I feel like I'm just working things out, but people seem to ask me and come to work with me, so they think I know enough.
Speaker 2:So, aisha, can we, can we just dive straight in and talk about your role as a career pivot consultant for leaders and what that involves?
Speaker 3:Yeah, very much so. So, toby, do you want me to kind of start off with that, or do you want me to kind of say, like, why I'm interested? Because I can give a very, very quick view of my own career pivots, if that would help people yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 3:Let's, let's backtrack, let's talk about your own career pivots, because I think that that kind of will set the scene, and then we'll talk about the work that you're doing now with leaders all right, I'll try and do it as quickly as possible because my career so far has been very I mean, you know it hasn't made sense, but it does now that I look back at it. So I started off when I read mechanical engineering at university and my first career was adjunct engineer basically. So I did that for about a year or so, was a graduate trainee and I loved engineering and logical thinking, but it just wasn't quite the right industry for me. So it's interesting you should mention about the gender issues you had in the BBC in tech. Mechanical engineering at that time I don't think it's changed massively was a huge imbalance in terms of women and and men there, and I was always very well treated. I did fine, but it it kind of got, I don't know, like a young, a young woman in her early 20s. I just kind of thought is this going to be my career forever? And I felt a bit tired of it. So anyway, I left engineering and I became a maths teacher because I didn't think I was going to teach for very long.
Speaker 3:I did a scheme which is called teach first, which was it's a scheme in England. There's an American version of it called teach for America. But basically the idea is you have graduates from particular types of courses and universities who wouldn't normally go into teaching and they do it teaching for two years and then they go work in interesting types of communities the kind of community that I was from, like working class communities, and then they do other things. So I did that and my two-year commitment stretched and I got promoted and did various things and I ended up working in teaching as a math teacher, head of department, assistant head teacher for 14 years. So I ended up quite liking it and I got to a stage where I looked ahead of me and the obvious thing to do teaching has a very defined career path. So the obvious thing would have been become a deputy head, become a head teacher. But I looked at the people who I knew who were doing those roles and I just they didn't seem to be living the kind of life that I wanted to live. Toby, let's just say that they didn't seem that happy. They seemed pretty stressed. I knew a few head teachers who'd had heart attacks. I knew some head teachers like he had. Unfortunately, um died by suicide, all these kinds of things, and I just thought I don't think, I want that and at the time I was still relatively young. Like I was um promoted pretty quickly and I was in my when I was thinking this.
Speaker 3:I was in my early 30s, I think early to mid 30s, and it was like, well, I've still got quite a long career ahead of me, another what 20, 30, maybe even 40 years of work, and I don't like, is this it, basically? And I decided it wasn't it and I wanted to leave teaching. But I had no idea what I was going to do. I'd taught for 14 years. Teaching is quite institutionalized. You know exactly what you're going to be doing, all that kind of stuff and I get a job, basically, and I um was in senior management and I thought, okay, how am I going to be able to change and still be able to afford my commitments with my family and all this kind of stuff? You know all the things that people who you've got responsibilities think about when they're shifting roles.
Speaker 3:And what I ended up doing was alongside that. We'll talk a bit more about it, probably, but I had a few side projects and interesting things and because of those I'd met some quite cool people. So I decided that I would just have coffee with a few different people who were doing interesting things that not necessarily that I wanted to do, but just I wanted to find out how they got into it. So nearly everyone that I'd spoken to had previously been a teacher at some point, but they were now doing something else. And I called a few people. I sent people. I was on Twitter or X as it was, so Twitter is as X previously used to be and I built up, you know, a reasonable number of people, like a few thousand people that I was connected to and had goodwill, so I sent them messages.
Speaker 3:It's like, look, I'm thinking of leaving teaching. I don't know what I want to do. Can I just have a chat with you because you look like you're doing something interesting and like you enjoy your life? And I did and had chats with these people and it was cool and eventually unbeknownst to me. One of the people that I spoke to was the CEO of this think tank. Like, um, think tanks do policy and research for people who don't know if they're not in that world and, um, we'd kind of like professionally overlapped a bit before because of some of the side projects that I'd done.
Speaker 3:I used to be part of this focus group for the department of education in UK national government and after we got chatting like we had dinner and we kept in touch and so on, and then a little bit later he was like, oh you know, I think we might be hiring. Do you think you might want to apply? And I was like I don't have any experience in policy, I don't. He's like no, I've seen you like you'd be fine, I think you'd be really good.
Speaker 3:And long story short is that I that ended up being my first role outside of teaching and that moved me into the world of policy, which is traditionally quite hard to get into if you haven't got like a policy background or policy degree or policy masters or something like that, which I didn't have. That gave me a bit of a foot in the door and then my career basically shifted to research policy. Then I had a strategy role after that and then I did some other kind of related type roles and now, which is its own story I am head of communications and marketing in a charity and I run my own business around career pivots because people in my network got to know that I seem to be quite good at changing sectors and shifting things and they asked me how do you do it? And people started to ask me to work with them. So that's the story, toby.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting, because I think a lot of people, when they start their career or they graduate from university, I think they think that their career will be linear. That's just not the case anymore. People don't stick with an employer for life, they're not in the same role and pivoting is very normal. And I like how you started off in engineering, then you went into teaching, then you moved into policy and strategy within government and now you're working in comms and obviously running your own outfit as a career pivoting expert. So that that's really cool. So can you just explain to us a bit more, then, about the work that you do with your clients in the career pivoting work that you do?
Speaker 3:yeah, okay, so what I currently do with my clients is I'll start like in terms of how this became to be, because it was, like my other story, kind of a bit random. Basically, somebody who's in my professional network contacted me and said do you do coaching? And at the time the answer was not exactly like I'd kind of done it internally. So I in my teaching role you know, when you're in leadership you often have to coach people. You end up doing that anyway. People ask you to help them out. And then one of my responsibilities had been the new and trainee teachers and then one of my other responsibilities had been the middle managers and helping to develop them. So kind of informally I had done some coaching and then some head teachers that I knew had asked me to go and work with their like middle and senior managers to help them with coaching. So I had done it and I'd kind of been paid to do it for other schools, but it wasn't something that I spoke very much about yet.
Speaker 3:And coaching is interesting because I'm a bit of a reluctant coach, in that I really love it, but I also also it can be frustrating because I think sometimes sometimes people think that coaching is the work, and it isn't like they think that because you've spoken to a coach, you've done all the things you're supposed to do and it's like no, no, that's just a conversation, you now need to go off and do something, yeah, so when this person approached me, I was like, look, I don't really do coaching. It's a bit frustrating. And I basically tried to put them off because I was like look, how do I know that you're actually going to do anything? I don't want to like waste my time or waste your time. Is it going to be useful to you? I don't even know if I'm what you're looking for. And she's like well, I.
Speaker 3:Her situation was that she was in a role and there'd been some kind of a restructure in her organization, something like that, and basically the way it ended up is that she kind of been demoted and then her role was kind of going to end, but she hadn't been ready for it and it was just a bit messy and she wasn't feeling great about it, and she decided that it was time for her to reevaluate what she wanted to do and she had a few things that she kind of thought she might do. But you know, like I had been previously. She had no idea at all what she was going to do and that's why she'd approached me, because she's like well, you know, I see you doing interesting things. You used to have this quite a fixed role. Now you do other stuff.
Speaker 3:And by that time I was doing bits of consultancy on the side as well, because people started to approach me because of my writing online and I said to her well, yeah, you know, if you think that I can help you, why not? Let's do this? And my kind of teaching background. And kicked in I was like, well, if you want me to help you do what I've done. Obviously you're a different person, so it's not the same thing, but why I? I kind of made a proposal to us like I'll do some coaching, we'll do something once a month, whatever, but I'm gonna also take you. Would you mind if I took you through the actual process that I've done?
Speaker 3:Because I realized that, like the engineering brain was always there, toby, I'm always like taking things apart and thinking what's the template, how did I do this? And like reverse engineering it. So I thought, without realizing it, I probably followed some kind of process and by the time she spoke to me. I'd kind of had a couple of pivots. I was like maybe I could write this down and then see if it actually works for somebody else, because it's obviously tailored to me and I just kind of done it intuitively. So I was like, would you mind if I'll send you a weekly task each week? Because I was thinking about what had worked before with previous people I'd coached. Like having something to actually do to keep them on task and be accountable was quickly been helpful and we'll meet once a month and you know we'll do. I think we agreed it was 12 or 16 weeks, I can't remember now, and then we'll see how it is. So she's like okay, cool. And I was like you can give me some feedback, I'll do it at a reduced rate, you know whatever. So we did that and that became like the version of the template or program or structure that I use with my clients.
Speaker 3:Now the end what happened was it turned out. So the idea is that it was written for somebody who knew they wanted to change but didn't know necessarily what that change was. Because if you know what it is, it's actually quite easy. All you need to do is talk to people who's doing that thing and then just do what they told you. That's, that's it. Yeah, but if you don't know, it's much, much harder because, especially if you're quite a skilled person, you've got a bit of experience, it could be any number of things, like you know you spoke about your, your career, toby there could have been any number of things that you could do with that experience that you've had to date. Right, it happened to be diversity, inclusion, but there could have been any number of avenues you could have taken. And in some ways that's harder because you're like where do I start? I have no idea. So it was written for people who they were like, I just want to to do something different, but I really can't tell you what.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And to go through that we worked together and it turned out that she, what she ended up doing, was she got a new job. I forget exactly what it was, but she had a new job that she was happy with. But she's always a random thing She'd been doing on the side. I'd been helping people who were speakers to coach them, and she ended up being a speaker coach uh, a very specialist speaker coach for people in a particular industry, and it's something she'd always wanted to do. And then she ended up setting up this quite lucrative, you know, side hustle in an essence, alongside her day job. That she'd kind of been, because before that she said she thought about all the sensible things that she should do. That kind of made sense and I was like, is that? You don't sound very excited when you talk to me about that? And she's like no, the thing I really want to do is this.
Speaker 3:And it turned out that you know she, we looked at her assets and stuff and it wasn't that out there. She thought it was very outlandish, but I was like, no, this is totally doable given your skill set, and that's what she ended up doing. So that was the first client that I had. Yeah, I put it away. Um. So I mentioned it to a few other friends and colleagues of mine and they were like this is really good, like this is super cool. One of them was like a CEO of a tech startup and she's like, oh, this is the kind of thing I could see buying for a few people who'd be made redundant, like you know, especially for a small business. All that and I was like, oh, do you think? She's like, yeah, you should definitely do something more with it. And then, um, covid happened.
Speaker 2:So I didn't do anything with it.
Speaker 3:I stayed at home, realized that the role that I was in wasn't that stable, so I kind of had to get another job which somebody approached me about. So again, like I'm kind of living the things I talk to people about, I didn't know about this job. Someone approached me because of other contacts and because of my online writing, and then we had three kids who were like under seven at that time. So it was very much survive, work and just make that happen. So it kind of got put away on the shelf. And then I got, uh, the person who I spoke about the my first client in that area. Um, I got an email from her head of people, head of HR at the new place that she was working at, which was like a technology company, who said, oh, you know, this person has recommended you to work with some of our people because she said she got a lot out of it. Can you tell us a bit more about what you do? And I was like, oh, I completely forgotten about it. And I was like, oh, I guess I should do something with that. So that didn't go anywhere, but it gave me enough confidence to realize that it was something that was valuable so fast forward to now. So generally I talk about career pivots, but I think the wider thing is really people creating career opportunities for themselves.
Speaker 3:Like I, very much believe that the work, the jobs market is much less stable than people think. It is much, much less stable. Even if you think you have a stable job, nothing is stable. You know, I, I know a number of people who've made redundant. Even if you're not being made redundant, companies are often changing, different things change up and you don't necessarily want to keep doing that thing.
Speaker 3:My clients tend to be mid-career in terms of not necessarily their seniority, but they're like where they are in life, lots of they've good experience, but they perhaps have reached the point they wanted to and, like me, realized they had many more years ahead of them. Or, you know, life circumstances have changed. So I have some clients who have now become carers of older parents, for example, or various things, something's health scares, all that kind of thing, or just that. They, when you get to a particular age, more people in your life start to get ill or die and it makes you reassess what you think is important. So they're people who are highly capable but are thinking is this it, and they don't want to just coast in their careers for another 20 or 30 years.
Speaker 3:You know, like um, one of my clients said to me this thing that I absolutely love, which is she's like I mean, I could just sit around and collect my money and I could be fine, but I kind of feel like I want some stretch, like I want stretch over comfort, and I thought that's such an interesting phase. So there are people who are massively valuable to the workforce but feel that they might be too expensive now if they aren't necessarily going to go for a CEO role or they're just like they want to work in a slightly different way, that kind of thing. Does that answer your question, toby? I know it's a long answer, but does that answer your question?
Speaker 2:No, it does. It's really interesting and a lot of what you were saying rings true with me. So when I career pivoted whilst at the BBC, I started off by doing a side hustle. So I, when I was at the BBC, I did a course that the BBC ran internally called coaching skills for managers, because as an agile project manager, our style was very much kind of like coaching the team and I loved coaching.
Speaker 2:So then I went off and did a diploma myself outside of work and I thought I'd be a coach, but at the time I wasn't sure whether I would want to do that as a full-time occupation, because I think I had some of the same trepidations as you had. So I thought, thought no, no, in the style of pivoting, what we'll do is, we'll test the waters. So I did coaching on the side and for a bit I actually reduced my hours at the BBC to a four-day week and then that meant I had a day a week to do coaching and I built up a little client base of coaching clients and that was a good experiment for me, because what I learned from pivoting and this was something I learned from working in IT actually as well, because we talk a lot about pivoting in IT, where you develop a solution you don't think it's quite working for your end user.
Speaker 2:So what you do is you kind of continue doing what you are doing, but then you create something on the side so that you can do a bit of an a b test yeah um, so effectively you've got feet in two camps and then you then you pick the one that's working and then you then you start doing the, the one that kind of is performing the best. And when I thought about that, when I took that analogy from software development, I applied it to my own career development. So I thought, okay, I'm going to continue being a project manager at the BBC, but I'm going to have one foot in the coaching industry and then I'll see which one takes off or which one I prefer the most.
Speaker 3:so yes, I'm just adding in some thoughts there about my own experiences of pivoting no, you're right, and it's funny because you know the main thing, obviously, that we're talking about is a career pivot thing, and it's taken me a while. Like you know, engineering is a related field to what you were doing it's. So there's a lot of we don't call it a b testing, testing and engineering, but you know it's iteration. Basically, you try a thing, you see how it goes, you have your hypothesis, give it a go and then you look back and see, okay, maybe it needs to be adjusted slightly. Let's do that. So that's very much my approach and I, you know, in your mind, do you think something is one thing, but then when people work with you or they know you or talk to you, they tell you it's something else, which is why sometimes I find it hard to describe things, because I'm like OK, yeah, it helps people to career pivot. Then my clients are like oh, actually knows, and I realize that there's I increasingly get people asking me to work with them on what I guess the kind of cool kids would call personal branding, which is not how I would necessarily describe it, but in essence, that's kind of what it it is, because if I think about the opportunities that I created for myself.
Speaker 3:That's kind of what I did, but without realizing it, it was, um, one of my kind of side projects just for myself was, uh, photography and documentary photography, and I got into that because I, a while ago, had had a breakdown because of stress at work and this kind of thing, and then I took some time out and I started. I actually started painting, but I didn't have enough space and I wasn't very good, so I switched it to something else which is related, which is photography. And, um, because I like to make things or whatever, and I'm much better when I have a reason to do things, I thought, okay, why don't I start a project? And I just did this project about. It was a documentary project. I taught myself how to be a photographer and how to interview and all this kind of stuff. I learned a load of skills, which, at the time, seemed very random, but actually a part of the reason why I was able to get this communications job actually because of the skills I started then.
Speaker 3:That then helped me later on in my career, but by doing that, I started to write online, and I started to write professionally online in terms of when I was in education as well. So I'd write about online and I started to write professionally online in terms of when I was in education as well. So I'd write about leadership because I was kind of working out as I went along. I just um promoted relatively quickly and quite young, so I didn't really know what I was doing and I'd kind of share my learnings about leadership. And then also I was kind of learning about education policy because I was interested in always like how do you have the biggest impact? That was my interest and all of that stuff is part of the reason why, you know, fairly, it wasn't very consistent like it was. You know, I'd write a blog here, I'd put something on Twitter there, like I was on Twitter but like I'd write blogs and that.
Speaker 3:But all of that is the reasons why the people that I later called when I wanted to leave teaching took my call because they'd become aware of me and me like sharing my expertise over time yeah so nowadays people call that like personal branding, but at the time it was just me sharing what I know and understand and I think, because of the types of people that I work with, that's quite a scary thing to them, like people in their kind of mid-40s mostly are not thinking about personal branding and feeling comfortable about writing things online. But the thing that I work with some of my clients on is because, well, they've realized that it can be hard to sell yourself on a CV when you have so much that you could offer and they don't quite know how to make it work. Like. I'm notoriously terrible at cvs. Like I my cvs, I think I only learned how to do a decent one about two or three years ago because you in teaching you don't really need to.
Speaker 3:My first engineering job I got that via. I didn't have to send a cv and I basically got it via writing to about 10 or 20 different firms. I narrowed down what the shortage areas would be. I matched my skillset to that and I wrote directly to the engineering directors and then said what I could offer and then I got two interviews out of it and both of them offered me a job. So I didn't ever have to do a CV for that.
Speaker 3:And then for teaching, you always have to write like very standardized application forms, so that. And then when I left, obviously that the first job that I got, I was offered it. It was kind of like created. I did a CV afterwards because you have to in terms of the process, but even like the guy who hired me was like this was not good, but it's a good thing that we knew that you were good and I never quite worked out like how to do them. So, yeah, like it's so for me. I think of it more from a creative point of view because, like, obviously I've got my creative hat on, which is artists and creatives.
Speaker 3:They have a portfolio that tells you what they can do, and I really strongly believe that people in the corporate world and like more traditional professionals, that's really how we should be using the internet like as a professional portfolio, as a way to show what you can do, an ongoing scrapbook, if you wish yeah, that's a brilliant idea because I've got a real bugbear with cvs because they're terrible.
Speaker 2:Cvs don't do a very good job at demonstrating your potential. The thing is like often people are selected for an interview because they're just very good at writing CVs, not because they've got the real skills and experience and potential and that growth mindset that a lot of employers are looking for. And actually, if you think about it, somebody who's pivoted their career are looking for. And actually, if you think about it, somebody who's pivoted their career take you, for example. You started off in engineering, went into teaching, went into policy and strategy and now work in charity and communications. A manager might look at that and they might start to jump to really unhelpful conclusions. They might start to say, well, this person just doesn't know what they want to do with their life. They can't stick at the same thing, blah, blah, blah. And it's just. I really like actually how to curate your own portfolio and communicate that out to the world is probably a better way of doing it. I really like that idea.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's essential and it's exactly what you said, toby. Like I've, you know, I've been on both sides and on the hiring panel. I've been part of hiring panels where you know, my colleagues have been like, oh, you know, they jumped around a lot and I was like you can't discount people because of that. Like you have no idea. Also, the other thing is, you know, specifically to what you talk about on this show diversity and inclusion I don't think that people who are in majority positions understand how difficult it can be sometimes for people who are not and the reasons why they have to leave their workplaces. Like they're not going to say that in interview.
Speaker 3:But sometimes you will get people who appear to have jumped around a lot and they've actually experienced quite a lot of discrimination, but they can't say that. Or you know it's like why have they got a succession of temporary roles? They have a succession of temporary roles because they can never get permanent roles, which is a structural issue. So you know, that's just a side thing for people who might be listening, who are in charge of hiring. So, but yeah, I my cv.
Speaker 3:I almost would have to rewrite it for every single job that I ever applied for to specifically tailor it, which really you ought to do anyway. But and I think this is going to increasingly become a problem as AI starts to be used to shift, sift things because what you're going to get on paper, every single one of my roles after teaching, I've had three, I think, or four different roles since teaching three, I think, or four different roles since teaching, I probably wouldn't even have got called to interview because there was nothing in the standards like kind of set of experiences that would show that I could do that role.
Speaker 3:And yet when I spoke to the people who were in charge uh, the people who kind of led those companies or whatever they saw in me that I could definitely do these things that I probably would never have applied for. And it's funny because, as you you said, if someone's just to hear me talk it might be like oh, you've jumped around like you don't know what you want to do, but actually there's a very strong thread of things. So what I talk to my clients about is my documentary photography stuff that helped me to understand how to tell stories and what I get to think about. There's one client I've got at the moment who oddly asked me to work with her on CVs. I was like I don't do CVs and she goes no, no, I know, but like I'd like to understand how to describe myself better. So we're working on like how can she tell her story and make it make sense for the kinds of roles that she's interested in? So we're coming at it from a completely different angle because you know she has a common thread, which is really about the importance of grassroots and community stuff and how it can impact wider society. That's her common thread and it just happens to come out in different ways.
Speaker 3:For me, I'm really about opportunity. When I was a teacher, I worked in the kinds of communities that I'd grown up in, which is like working class communities. At the time it was in London and what I wanted to do is, by luck and my parents kind of approach in things, education was really important to them and they made sure that I, you know, I went to a grammar school outside of my area, I went to a great school and then I ended up going to good university and all this kind of stuff so to me, and then I had access to things that I would not normally have had and that other people where I'd grown up and like some of my own family members, had not had access to. So that made me think, okay, this is not fair, because these people that I knew and grew up with and that I, you know, still see they're as clever as me, they're as resourceful as me. They just didn't have those opportunities. So really, the lens for me is opportunity always, but it was in different settings, like in education. It was like, okay, I had a great education, that's what helped me to be able to be able to have access to different things. I would like to be able to, in a small way, help other young people from the kinds of backgrounds I was from to access that. So I did that as best I could. First it was as a class teacher when I eventually learned to be good, then as a head of department, so that was making sure that everybody had a great maths education, because maths is notoriously taught terribly and there's a shortage of math teachers. And then it was as an assistant head teacher.
Speaker 3:When I became assistant head teacher, I realized there were a number of things that were structural issues, which is why I then shifted to policy, because I thought, okay, maybe I can start to affect that at scale instead, like with the people who make the policy that teachers have to work underneath. And then policy is a bit slow moving for me, unfortunately, toby. So I uh. What happened is I ended up working in strategy at a national charity and that was just a luck thing. Somebody that I had met in my previous role shared the job with me. Basically I applied for that job and didn't get it and they were like we think you'd be great at this job and they basically created a post for me which they thought was better suited to my skills, which is around strategy and policy. But they were just starting a new 10-year strategy and it was to change the focus of this national charity so that it would be much more accessible to a wider range of people and they felt like that's something that fitted my background. So we did that and then my role after that was kind of like change and strategy related to that.
Speaker 3:And then the you know, the communications thing has really come about because again it's an area that I care about. It's, um, going a little bit back to like, young people who are experiencing particular issues in their educational lives but working with the school leaders. So that's going to my previous leadership experience. But the communications and marketing stuff is because I've been doing that stuff throughout for myself with my own consultancy, that people approach me about developing the storytelling as well. So it's all for me just a vehicle to help people to create opportunity.
Speaker 3:The common thread for me is opportunity, because I feel like everybody, from whatever background they're from should have equal opportunity and we don't live in that world, unfortunately. So I'm like. I know that's not true. I understand there are particular structural inequalities and stuff. I'm not best suited to be an activist, it's just not for me. But what I can do is try and work it from the other side and give people the skills, uh, that I have learned and that people I know from wealthier backgrounds have because of their backgrounds already yeah I can help people know about those things and yeah, that's why I always write stuff for free, because I want people who can't access my services to be able to just teach themselves if they want to.
Speaker 3:But then other people we do paid work and it's about. You know, I said I work mostly with women and people who are kind of older. I work with men as well, but again they tend to be people who consider themselves to be not standard in their approach to things. It's always people who are slightly left field, maybe don't want to climb the career ladder anymore, just people who consider the world a bit differently.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really cool. I like how you've identified that common thread throughout you know, throughout your history. If the person listening to us right now is thinking of pivoting their career, yeah how should they go about doing that? What's your advice to them?
Speaker 3:yeah, great question, okay. So there's a few things and obviously I can talk about it very succinctly now, relatively so, because I thought about this for a long time, right, but initially I couldn't. There's a few things. So, in terms of the process that I take people through, there's kind of for me four or five pillars. So one of them is starting off with your values and your assets. That's really, really important. Uh, particularly if you've had a bit of experience in the workplace.
Speaker 3:I think when you're a younger person, you kind of just do the thing that sounds sexy or that you think you should do, and then you do that thing and it either works out or it doesn't. Like some people, it's like they happen to choose the right thing. Other people it's like this isn't for me. So the place I always advise people to start with is values and assets. Now, it's hard to do that if you're very, very stressed. So if you're somebody who you'd be made redundant, you don't have any money whatever. First I would say like get a job, get anything and get some money. And if you have to do that because this kind of thinking you can't do it very well if you're in like a stressed place, you're just not going to make great decisions, so that side of things has to be sorted.
Speaker 3:I would say but, yeah, values, uh mindset, and the reason it doesn't have to be like a massively convoluted process. It's kind of I can do this and with somebody, in about half an hour or an hour, you kind of come out with like your top three values and the point of that is then it's kind of that helps you to then think of a framework for what your decision making will be going forward. So I get people to think okay, how have those values been in place in your personal and work life for like the last 30 days? And then, going forward, how would you like it to be? And what I've had clients, um, tell me is that that's been a very valuable exercise for them because they've realized they're quite disconnected from their values and how they want to be living in the world and what the work they want to be doing.
Speaker 3:Now. It doesn't tell you the kind of work you might want to do, but it tells you what are the kinds of things that light you up, what the kinds of things that would be interesting to you, and that is essential because it allows you to just filter out certain things, just like I don't want to do that property opportunity. But it also allows you to say yes to opportunities that you might otherwise have been like. Oh, I'm not sure if that's what I should be doing, but you realize it's in accordance with your values.
Speaker 2:And it's probably a good way potential organizations that you might want to go and work for if you, if you don't have that, that values alignment with the business a hundred percent.
Speaker 3:So, also for me, advice I give to myself and also to clients is if you are not sure and you have two opportunities or maybe more, always go with the values and the people always like the people that you get the best vibe from. That's the thing. Even if it's less, I'm not paid as well, even if it's like, because everything else can change, but the people are not going to change, the vibe's not going to change. So that is, if you get stuck, that's the way to go for it. Um, and then your assets. So this obviously doesn't work if you're earlier in your career but got a few years under your belt, like you've been working like seven, eight, nine, ten years, whatever. Then your assets what happened? What I noticed is that people do undersell themselves in terms of what they can do. So when I talk about assets, I take people through um, kind of a framework, which is we look at like six different assets that people have, like, say, one of them would be your connections and people that you know. So in the story, when I talked to you about my career, I realized that there are people that I happen to know who might be able to give me some advice and, as it happened, one of those led to a job. I didn't ask them for a job, but I was asking them for specific advice and then that's what happened and that's happened to me two or three times where I've just asked people for advice on a particular thing I was thinking about and it's led to a job offer without me asking for it. So people have a variety of assets that they don't realize and it's useful for them to kind of know what they're not just their skills, but all the things are that they can look at. So people, your networks, uh, any kind of for me, I have intellectual property, like I've written a book or you know your. For me, like content, stuff online, all those kind of things that could be interesting and valuable to other people that you don't necessarily realize. This is something where, if you work in an organization, you do have assets, but obviously often belong to the organization, which is part of why I'm so bullish on people building their own portfolio, because when you leave the organization, it belongs to that organization, right, but if you're building your own stuff alongside, then that's something you can always bring with you. Yeah, the next thing that we think about is at the moment.
Speaker 3:I call it like employee versus entrepreneur mindset. I don't want to confuse people. I'm not saying that everyone should become an entrepreneur Like it's not for everybody. But my kind of like strapline is that people should build their careers like an entrepreneur. They can treat themselves like a business and also like you don't have to be one, you just need to think like one.
Speaker 3:And that is really about how do you spot opportunities. Oh, let me just get it up actually, because I can probably just say might be useful for people. All right, so I've got like creating your own opportunities versus waiting to be picked, being paid for your expertise as opposed to being paid for your time, taking ownership of stuff versus needing permission, solving problems versus selling your skills, making offers, uh, and sharing your work versus waiting for validation and qualifications. And taking control of your own time versus having your schedule controlled like that's kind of how I define it. And like do quite a lot of work with clients on that, because when you do that, you start to think of yourself as somebody who solves problems as opposed to somebody who's a commodity.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's really, really important, because whether you're in an organization or not, it just makes you just come up with a different energy and also it makes people approach you of different energy and you start to be that person who is asked to help set things up, or you know, you develop all these skill sets and, like you and I, toby, it wasn't that hard for me to shift to entrepreneurial life because I was already behaving like that when I was in the organizations. It wasn't that difficult. So it's more, how do you make things happen?
Speaker 2:I really like that and that's something I did at the BBC. I read a really great book called the intrapreneur. Don't know if that's a term you've come across before, but it's basically how you use entrepreneurship skills, qualities and tools within a company, within the corporate environment.
Speaker 3:Yes, exactly that, exactly that. So, like my thing. If people go to my LinkedIn, what they'll see on my banner is I've got build your career like an entrepreneur, and it's kind of that's the concept I'm getting people to think about. How do you think about yourself as a business, even if you don't want to change sectors or you don't want to become an entrepreneur, because not all my clients do they're just thinking how can they? And the other thing that is not on that list I gave you but I thought about later is entrepreneurially speaking.
Speaker 3:You think about when you work with organizations. You think about it as a partnership, and I think that's how we should be approaching working internally with our organizations. It's it's a partnership. They are giving us stuff like our salary and this and that and the other, some degree of security, if you will, but also what are we getting? And you need to? It's a much healthier view to think of it as a partnership where you need to deliver, but also what are we getting and you need to? It's a much healthier view to think of it as a partnership where you need to deliver, but also so does your organization, and I think sometimes we can be in a slightly different mindset with that. The other thing I think about is mindset. So the mindset thing is it sounds a bit nebulous, but really it's a lot about confidence because people can do the other bits. They can do the value they can think about. They can think about this.
Speaker 3:But I've noticed that the bit that stops people taking action is they start to doubt themselves or they think am I really as good as I think I am? Especially when I'm talking to kind of women maybe 40s, 50s different stuff starting to happen in their lives. You know, toby, like they might've been through a divorce, they're starting to hit menopause, all of these things like um, they're just a bit more tired than they once were. The things that you once could do when you were in your 20s are not possible anymore because of just the energy levels and that kind of thing. And you are a bit more aware of the, the dreams that you had that maybe you didn't meet. Or you're aware of the things that you did meet and actually it wasn't quite what you thought it was like. You know, you've had a bit more experience in the world so that sometimes can knock people's confidence. They might have been made redundant. You know, things have definitely happened to people most of the time. By the time you're in your mid-40s, maybe people that you care about are not there anymore. So we do a reasonable amount on confidence.
Speaker 3:But, uh, because of my more logical and scientific and background, I'm not like massive on things like affirmations. I think they're great but like I don't, they don't help logical people like me. For me, confidence I talk to people about like collecting their receipts and that is really. You have evidence of things that you can be proud of in your career and I get them to think about what are the bits of evidence that you have that you can collect that build up the confidence that you'll be able to do this new thing or to do this other thing that you're not sure about.
Speaker 3:So, for me, I've never been the head of communications and marketing before, but I was able to look at actually, when I look at that role, firstly, somebody approached me about it, so they must've thought I could do it. So that's the one thing. And the second thing is, if I look at the elements of this role, I've done every element of this role in other roles, so I haven't done this one thing, but I've done all the bits of it in other places and people have been happy with it. So that evidence suggests that I should be able to do this. So we do. That's how I tend to approach confidence, which is getting people to what I call collect their receipts.
Speaker 2:And I like that phrase collect your receipts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, collect their receipts. And I like that phrase collect your receipts. Yeah, collect your receipts. Basically it's the evidence of it. And um, we talk about like chucking the 3am gremlins in the bin, like telling them to stop talking, because you know, they can be very loud and then the last bit, which is, um, the kind of the way the personal branding if that's what people want to call it comes in, is what I call influence.
Speaker 3:So me being on this podcast is evidence of it in some ways. I wrote some stuff on LinkedIn. You guys contacted me. That wouldn't have happened otherwise because you wouldn't have come across each other. So influence is really for my clients who are particularly interested in this kind of thing. It's more the ones who want to build more of a portfolio type career and how you can start to attract opportunities. Career and how you can start to attract opportunities. Now, I'd never thought about it before in this terms, but it's probably me teaching individuals how to do marketing. That's probably what it actually is, but I would never have thought about it like that before and specifically, my particular tools are online in a way that suits that person. But it's also about them using the existing network as well, because I think it'd be interesting to hear your experience on this, toby.
Speaker 3:But people think you have to do all this crazy stuff to get clients or to get new opportunities. All the new opportunities in the very beginning, they all come from people that you already know like 100 percent they're going to come from people that you already know, and it's not even people that you know super, super well, it's just people. And that's like going back to the assets. Super, super well, it's just people and we. That's like going back to the assets. It might be the friend of the friend or the person that you never knew paid any attention, that you met in the meeting once and was kind of impressed by you, and then, now that you're talking more about the things that you're doing, they're like oh yeah, like I remember them, they were quite cool.
Speaker 3:My first five or six commissions were all as a result of partners that I had come across in my day job. Every single one, like before I started doing the career, pivot stuff in my kind of consultancy. And now my first few clients were, yeah, there were people in my existing network but oddly, they found out about what I was doing because I wrote about it online. I was too shy to tell people actually in person.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that's how I started my business, like when I left the city to set up my own diversity and inclusion consultancy. I wrote a list of people in my network and I just arranged to meet them for coffee and I said to them I'm leaving the city, I'm leaving my job, I'm setting up my own diversity and inclusion consultancy, don't really know what I'm doing, I don't know what projects I'm going to do. Can I just meet with you, pick your brains, you know, to get clarity for myself in what I'm going to do with my own business. And I had loads of people say yeah, come along, meet me for coffee. You know it'd be good to have a catch up and a chat. Some of those conversations led to paid projects. I, when I first set up my own company, my marketing was non-existent other than just reaching out to people that were already in my network yeah, exactly that and the same thing.
Speaker 3:Like, um, you know, when I started so before I'd been doing a bit of consultancy on the side alongside my day job. When I started my business so this was kind of in last year I thought I'd give it a proper go alongside my. Like you, I was, I'm working part-time in my day job and I do this and there's big overlap because the kind of things that I'm doing in terms of marketing for myself and that, uh, things that I can also use in my day job and vice versa. Now I didn't like I have an old website which is just my blog, but I don't really have a website about my business. My LinkedIn banner was a picture of me on a mountain in Scotland, like it was just a mess. It was terrible but it was. But what I did and that's why I'm reluctant to call it personal branding as such is because that is a big scary thing that people get worried about. What I actually did was because I'd taken five months out. I had some savings and I thought I don't want to do a random panic job, let me think about what I actually want to do and have a bit of a rest. But I knew that whenever I wrote things, good things happened. That's all I knew. So I thought, okay, I'll write every single day. And I had a small newsletter list of like 70 people and I thought I don't want don't want to annoy them by writing every day to them. I'll do it on LinkedIn, because no one's going to see it on LinkedIn, no one cares, but it will just help me to get things out. And I wrote every day and I thought I'd do it for 30 days, and the reason why I am so big on people doing this in the capacity that they feel comfortable with is not every day for everybody, but, you know, whatever regularly is, it helps me to shape my ideas.
Speaker 3:So initially I was talking a lot about networking. There wasn't much uptake with that. People like, oh, that's interesting and there's some other bits and pieces. And then I started talking about career pivots and then people started to talk to me and I, in essence, I was doing like testing of the market, without even realizing it was me kind of doing what you were doing with coffee chats, but at scale and from home, you know, which is also really important to your audience, because not everyone can go somewhere, not everyone lives in a big city or has access to one, like maybe you and I do. If you're somewhere rural, like you, can't be saying I'm going to come and go see you in london or I'm going to go to birmingham or whatever every time and that'll cost you. That's just annoying. So much time and energy, right? Yeah, so, but you can jump on a zoom, you can uh talk to people, you can write things online and then you can reach anybody in the world.
Speaker 3:So by doing that, I got approached about by by this international consultancy because I'd updated my LinkedIn profile and all that just to, um, you know, give them like a one hour chat. But that was paid and I was like, oh, this is cool, that's interesting. And then I started writing some more. And then people started writing some more. And then people who, going back to our point about my existing network, they were like, oh, I saw what you wrote about that, tell me some more about it, et cetera, et cetera, and that was it. And over time I've done it because I was trying to see what is it that people find interesting, what don't they? All that kind of stuff. I realized that my message has slightly evolved Even from when we set up the chat between me and and you.
Speaker 3:Uh, my thinking is clarified because of me writing, and then, testing it and talking to people about it, and so for me, the personal branding kind of is a is not exactly the right way to describe it, because it's really about people testing ideas, and that, again, is a key thing when you're trying to create opportunities. You can try and do this project or offer something that people don't really care about. You don't know it until you've offered it, and some people can waste a lot of time designing things that actually nobody wants, whereas the smallest possible thing you can do is to write a post about it. Or, if you're a video person, you know, do I?
Speaker 3:don't know whether people do a youtube or a tiktok or whatever the cool people do, um, and then if no one replies to you, like there's no point in you trying to build that thing out because no one cares.
Speaker 3:But if people do ask you about it, that's the smallest possible test, like um. I don't know if you know there's a entrepreneur called daniel priestly and he talks about like the smallest possible test that you can do for him. He does like um scorecards, like he calls my questionnaires or whatever, and like I tried the idea and that got me kind of, you know, like a long-term client just by trying that idea, testing out in my newsletter. And then someone got back to me yeah, so yeah, like the influences around testing your own ideas in public, however that looks for people. So for me I'm comfortable writing online, but actually some of my clients they've got existing networks and they do that in their closed networks or people they have access to and then using that to start to be known for a particular thing, and that is really where all the opportunities start to come. Like that's where it just snowballs and you start to get opportunities.
Speaker 2:That's really cool. So before we go, a couple of final questions. First of all, everybody gets asked this question when they come on this show what does inclusive growth mean for you?
Speaker 3:yeah, great question. I had to think about it, um, and I thought that you know. Going back to my thing about opportunity and equality of opportunity, I feel like inclusive growth to me means that if I, for me, like, growth is synonymous with success and in our society, that means a particular thing. If we're going to think about it in an inclusive way, I think it's reframing what growth and success looks like. It doesn't have to be somebody who you're only successful if you, you know, earn a particular amount, if you were a CEO, if you've achieved these particular things or you own these certain things. You know there may be people who are very capable of that or who've done that, but actually they now want to do something else, and that, to me, is what inclusive grocery is. That should be something that is celebrated and that we respect as much as, you know, becoming the richest person in the world brilliant now.
Speaker 2:If the person listening to us right now is really interested in pivoting their career, they would like to follow your work, learn more about your writings, the work that you do. Maybe they want to get in touch with you. What's the best way of doing that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great, ok, so best way is probably to jump onto my newsletter, which is AyeshaSmallcom forward slash newsletter. So I-E-S-H-A small S-M-A-L-Lcom forward slash newsletter. Some people are into newsletters. That's totally fine. You can follow me on LinkedIn. So I'm Ayesha Small on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat to people in DM. So if you DM me, I will do that. Yeah, and the other thing I realized if I'd been more organized, toby, I would have been like the thing that I people can't see it because obviously this is audio for them, but I do have a graphic of the employee mindset and entrepreneur mindset. I'm very happy to share that with people if they fancy, if they get into contact with me, I'll. I'll send them that brilliant.
Speaker 2:Yeah, probably best just to connect with you on LinkedIn and request that graphic and in a DM yeah, exactly that.
Speaker 3:that's probably the simplest thing for them to do and we can have a chat.
Speaker 2:Brilliant Well, ayesha. Thank you ever so much for joining us today. It's been really great to sit down and talk to you about pivoting careers. It's been really insightful for me because I've as I said at the top of the show, I've done my own career pivoting and learned lots from that experience. So thanks ever so much for joining us.
Speaker 3:Thanks, it's been an absolute pleasure to be. It's nice to kind of talk things through and uh hope it's useful for your audience cheers.
Speaker 2:Thank you, um, and thank you for tuning into this episode of the inclusive growth podcast with aisha and myself. Hopefully, you've taken away some really interesting insights, tools, tips on how you might want to pivot your own career. If that's something that you're interested in, there's lots of really cool stuff to take away that I think you can implement straight away in your own career. If you do need any help from Aisha with your own career pivoting, then please do reach out to her on LinkedIn, and if you need any support on your diversity and inclusion journey from me and my team, then please get in touch through our website, mildencouk. Until the next time, I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, which will be coming up very soon. Until then, take good care of yourself. Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website.