SLIDING DOORSI loved PwC and I loved my clients but I simply wasn’t sure if Partner was right for me in the end. Practice gives you an amazing wealth of business knowledge and stakeholder experience and despite being happy there, I don’t think in my mind I really thought enough about what I was aiming for.
Everyone is ambitious and the aim of their career within Practice is to get to Partner. Making Director was a progression of delivering great client experiences, winning work and executing projects but again, it wasn’t a conscious decision of mine toprogress to Director, it was just a natural consequence of hard work and good attitude. I was working towards Partner for some time as, without thinking, I assumed that is what I wanted but I found it was changing the way I was thinking about things and found that while I was certainly learning a lot from it, it was an extremely stressful process. I wasn’t looking to move into Industry, I was on a great career trajectory but I started to wonder if it really was my end goal, given the fact I had never thought about anything else.
Many people leave Practice once they qualify, others leave at different points after qualifying but after 18 years in Practice, I wasn’t sure I could do anything else. Then I had a meeting at O2, walked into the building and felt like it was a place I could thrive. I ended up asking them for a job. No planning or real thought behind it other than respecting the brand, really liking the people and an instinct which led to a job offer and leaving PwC, all in a quick time frame. Looking back, I wasn’t sure how I was brave enough to do it but I left PwC, heavy-hearted to leave a place I loved and fairly scared about what I was going to find in the outside world but feeling very happy to end up somewhere so unexpected and wonderful.
FINDING YOUR USP
The benefits of Practice are that you meet so many different people and work on so many different projects that time flies and you are constantly learning. You are given a real opportunity to get in there quickly, build internal and external relationships and thrive in intense deal environments which build a real skill of getting on a person’s agenda and building relationships. But, you do find yourself in an organisation with a lot of people with a very similar skillset so it’s really hard to find your USP.
As a Director, we all have to be great at winning work, forming strong relationships and providing high quality work. In industry, your job is your job alone and no-one else; at least not at the same time, can do that for you. You don’t chop and change, you are doing the same role but within a role you can have a real breadth of experience - and while you are not constantly learning from new clients, you are evolving your role and feel a sense of belonging with and responsibility for the business. An equally valuable but different path. You build up a real level of experience by working in a number of different roles, even in the same industry, and we are now witnessing a growing trend where professionals enjoy and expect to move between functions and roles fairly regularly. People want a wider breadth of skills and that all-important career diversity. I was surprised by the level of diversity I was able to achieve in Industry - I started off at O2 then went to giffgaff as the CFO and now I’m back at O2 on my third role in three years having learnt plenty in each one.
FINDING YOUR PLACE OUT OF PRACTICE
I had very little telecoms experience before coming to O2 because I was a capital markets specialist - what I brought was a specialism to whichever industry needed it, I was sector agnostic and I liked it that way because it gave me such variety.
I think, except for Financial Services, which would be a hard industry to learn from scratch, it is less about the industry and more about the type of function or role you want to go into.
For me, the FP&A role at O2; which was my first role out of Practice, was all about understanding what the business was doing and crafting that into a story that the business and shareholder would understand. It was a skill I could take into most industries because the principles are sector agnostic. I don’t think I’d have gone into a commercial finance role straight away; I needed a central business role, preferably involving story-telling, where I could work with lots of different stakeholders.
KEY LEARNINGS
I realised that I’m braver than I thought, in terms of stepping out of what was a really solid and growing career to do something completely different. I also realised that the skills I learned in Practice were incredibly valuable. You bring something a bit different to Industry and what I have learned is that spending time in a finance function rather than with clients is equally as rewarding, as something is always changing so I still get breadth and excitement. I have never regretted the move nor regretted not moving sooner.My main aim is to be happy in my career. I was happy at PwC and I am happy now. I don’t feel the need to unpick the paths I have taken but rather reflect on the opportunities that arose and the career that followed. I’m glad I was brave enough to act on gut instinct.
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