Before becoming a careers counsellor I had a long career in the civil service, and before that I had lots of odd jobs – I actually worked in Australia for a few years – but my main career was in the civil service. I’d say my greatest achievement was taking the decision to leave that career and do a degree as a mature student , which led to this job. Because I realised when I was in my old career that to progress any further I’d need to get some further qualifications. So my greatest achievement was getting a degree in my 40s.

Video Transcript

We all muck in, we all do bits of everything. You’ll often find the Head of Careers on Reception or making the tea for visitors. But the formality of that is that we all have responsibilities for different academic schools. We’ve become more business-focused because we’ve changed the focus from being what bight have been seen as a ‘problem’ service or a place where people went if they had a problem, and we’ve become more dynamic and tried to become a service students just use as a matter of course.

We have a great professional network called AGCAS  and we have an email link with them so if we have an odd question from a student about a career, we can email and say, “Has anybody come across this before?” and we always get lots of replies, so it’s a really useful network for us to have.

It’s definitely a fulfilling career. The best bit is that you meet lots of different people, you’ll hear people’s stories and you have to be interested in what people have to say. It’s the only career, actually I’ve ever had – and I’ve finally found it in my 40s! – where I don’t dread coming to work every day. I really look forward to it.