Growing at Work
Five years in, you know the job. You do not yet know the career.
By the fifth year most people are competent and a little restless. The next steps are less obvious, the advice is less specific and the people with answers are busy. This session puts one experienced professional in front of a group to say, in their own words, what they would tell themselves at that point, and then takes questions. What is said comes from the speaker's own experience and is not a rule for anyone else.
Explore this page6 sections
Advice is easiest to hear from someone who has been where you are.
Early career advice is plentiful. Advice for the stage after it, when you are competent, have options and are not sure what to do with them, is harder to find. Much of what people learn at this point comes from one conversation with someone slightly ahead, which is hard to arrange and rarely repeated.
This session is built around that conversation. It is a practitioner's account, not a lecture, and the speaker is a guest, not an authority. One person's path is one person's path; the point is to give people something to compare with their own, and to make it easier to ask.
What the session can cover
27 topics across 6 areas. Six areas the speaker may draw on. The speaker chooses what to talk about.
Direction and ChoicesWhere to go when nobody has told you.5
- Specialising versus staying broad
- Moving company versus staying and growing
- Moving into management, or staying technical or specialist
- How the speaker decided, and how they would decide now
- Choices that looked large and were not
Skills and LearningWhat turned out to matter.5
- Skills that paid off, and some that did not
- Learning on the job and outside it
- Writing, speaking and making a case
- Understanding how the business makes money
- What they wish they had started earlier
People and RelationshipsCareers happen through other people.5
- Managers who made a difference, and what they did
- Mentors and how to find them
- Colleagues who became long-term contacts
- Handling conflict and disappointment
- Keeping in touch with people after you move
Money and SecurityWithout figures or advice.4
Speakers are not financial advisers and do not recommend products or figures. Participants should seek qualified advice for their own situation.
- Thinking about pay, savings and security as a career lengthens
- Risk at different stages of life
- Fixed and variable commitments
- When the speaker would and would not take a risk
Work and the Rest of LifeHow the balance changed over time.4
- What the speaker stopped doing, and what they started
- Family, health and caring responsibilities alongside a career
- Working patterns that were sustainable and ones that were not
- What they would protect earlier
Mistakes and RecoveriesWhat went wrong and what followed.4
- Decisions the speaker would make differently
- A setback and how they recovered
- Advice they ignored, and advice they wish they had ignored
- What they would tell a friend in the same position
Questions participants often bring
- How did you decide when to move?
- What did you not know that you should have asked?
- Which choices mattered less than they seemed?
- What do you wish someone had told you about people?
- What would you do differently if you started now?
What this session is not
- Not a lecture or a prescription
- Not financial, legal or career-counselling advice
- Not a promotion of the speaker's employer or product
- Not recorded or shared outside the room
- Not a place to name colleagues or employers
How the session runs
One experienced professional, who has agreed in advance to speak candidly about their own career and not about named people or employers, talks for about twenty minutes. The rest of the time is questions, then small-group discussion on what participants would take into their own situation. The speaker is chosen with the host to suit the group's field. We brief speakers on what to avoid, including naming individuals, giving financial advice and promoting a product.
What your students leave with
- A frank account of the middle of a career from someone further along
- Questions they had not thought to ask about direction, choices and people
- A better sense of which worries are common and which are specific to them
- Ideas to test in their own situation rather than rules to follow
- A chance to ask what they could not ask their own manager
- Contact with others at a similar stage in other companies
Scheduled sessions
Nothing scheduled yet
Sessions are arranged with a college once a date is agreed. Ask us and we will find the right person for it.
A student rather than a college? See what is coming up, or ask your placement team to host this.
Come with the question you have not been able to ask anyone.
Tell us who your students are and what stage they are at. Sessions are free for participants.