4 minute read
Careers Workshop
CAREERS WORKSH O P
Changing Careers
A ‘career for life’ is increasingly a thing of the past, with research from the Association of Accounting Technicians showing that 46% of Britons will change careers during their working life. In this article, Tim Moule (1981) shares his personal experiences of a career change after redundancy.
Having been taught maths at The Perse by Mr Whittaker, Mr Pinhey, Mrs McFarlane and Mr Bradford, I went on to study maths at Oxford University. I had planned to train as a maths teacher afterwards, and got as far as applying, but after some rejections questioned whether I had the maturity to handle a class. After a high score in a computer aptitude test (and having relevant experience in a job between school and university), I reconsidered and decided to pursue a career in IT.
I duly spent 23 years working in computing. Most of the first ten years was with a major pharmaceutical
company; when I was made redundant from that I advertised myself in the user magazine for an IT package I had used in that role. I then spent almost 13 years with a small company that provided drug testing to companies wishing to ensure their employees were not working under the influence of performancedegrading recreational drugs for safety reasons. The switch to a much smaller company was quite a culture shock – major decisions (such as expensive purchases, or disciplinary matters) were made far more quickly. I moved from being a small cog in a large wheel to a large cog in a very small wheel, and was single-handedly responsible for the company critical system used to store and process information about samples, which was much more stressful, and I was on-call even on holiday.
However competent you may be at your job, if you stay there long enough you are likely to be made redundant, and this happened to me in both these roles due to site relocation; both times I decided not to move but to take redundancy. IT is (or certainly was then) quite an ageist career, in that it is often difficult to find another job when you are over forty, and it is easy for your IT skills to become outdated. If you are made redundant mid-career, trying to continue in the same industry is often viewed negatively, whereas branching out in a new career is often seen as a positive move. So whilst first time round I took the pay cut and leapt straight into another job, I had long realised that this would not be so easy the second time.
Being aware of the possibility of redundancy was key, and I had felt for several years that my job with the drug-testing laboratory would come to an end sooner or later. I had been discussing options with my wife for some five years before it happened, and we had decided that I would prepare to switch to teaching, which I had looked at more than twenty years earlier. I spent a few days observing lessons in two very different schools, including one very badly behaved lesson, giving me much food for thought. I had friends from church who were teachers at these schools who helped arrange the observations, however I understand most schools will respond positively to such requests from prospective student teachers.
I applied for a teacher training course, and was duly accepted (using the redundancy payment to fund it). With greater maturity and life experience I had learnt from mistakes I had made at interviews first time round, and the general manager of the laboratory I worked for kindly gave me a practice interview and feedback. I also realised that the important thing was to get a place at a nearby university; whether it was prestigious was secondary; any such place would provide competent training. It probably would have been helpful to have spoken to recently qualified teachers about the full-on nature of the course, particularly how to handle things if your mentor makes life difficult for you. There are books on being a student teacher, which I probably should have taken the time to read long before I started the course.
The course itself was very intensive, as well as a real shock to the system – pupil misbehaviour took a lot of getting used to and was very stressful. I remember back to my time at The Perse, hearing teachers discussing how they managed their classes, and can now empathise with them! I survived the course (unlike more than a third of my colleagues), and I view reaching qualified teacher status as the achievement of my career. By the end of it I was suffering from total exhaustion (made much worse by the 100-mile daily round trip to and from my second teaching placement).
Having trained in secondary schools, I was fortunate to be given a job at a post-16 school. The greater maturity of the pupils meant fewer behavioural problems, and far more opportunities for A Level teaching. I also did a lot of GCSE maths resit teaching, and the impact on a pupil’s career prospects of obtaining a grade C (now grade 4) is huge – results day can be very rewarding.
After ten years in teaching (and feeling completely worn out) my finances enabled me to semi-retire, and I now just do some part-time tuition.
Tim left The Perse in 1981 to study a BA in Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
