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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Walk into Your Next Grade. This is a podcast for thoughtful Higher Education professionals who are exploring career progression. I'm Fiona Bicket, your resident Professional Development coach, and each week I'll help you untangle what working at the next level really means and remind you that you don't have to turn into someone else to build the kind of career success you want.
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So grab your headphones and come for a walk with me as we work out the moves that matter most as, you Get Ready for Your Next Grade. So this week I had a great question come in from somebody who asked me.
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There's always an element of being in the right place at the right time and saying yes to the right opportunities. How do we get more control over this narrative? So, great question. I'm sure it will resonate with a lot of people listening. And, what I want to say about this one is I really notice that it conveys a bit of luck.
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There's a sense that, you know, it's just luck whether you're in the right place at the right time. And I don't know if it's being an optimist or if it's being in the line of work that I am, but I just kind of have to subscribe to the view that we make our own luck.
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So, yes, you have to be in the right place at the right time. And I think sometimes those right place, right time circumstances can kind of seek you out if you are articulating or signalling what you're open for.
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And sometimes through your actions and what you're telling people, you can be signalling that you're not open to those right place, right time, kind of opportunities. And, I've had experience of this in an early career stage.
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I was leaving a role that I'd been in for a few years. I've progressed really quickly in that role. I came in on like a grade, four kind of admin assistant type of role, very quickly progressed through five, up to six.
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And then as I was leaving that institution because my life moved from Edinburgh to London, we were in the process of upgrading their role again to grade seven. And I think one of the things that was really noticeable there was on my last day, one of my colleagues said, can I have a conversation with you?
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Can we go in this room? So we went in. We worked in an open plan office most of the time. She invited me into a side room where we could shut the door and have some privacy. She was like, you know, I'm Like really pleased for you that you're moving to London and that life's giving you what you want and all of that, but just really feel like you've had, you've been given all of the opportunities that I always wanted.
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I just thought they were so interesting. Obviously I tried to, you know, hold that with some, integrity and not be really defensive, but what was really noticeable to me was that I was somebody who said yes to stuff, later in my career that really got me in trouble actually, because I found myself just saying yes to everything and not knowing when to say no.
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In those early days, it was great. I just. People would say, do you want to get involved with this? I say, yeah, sure. Do you want to get involved with, that? Yeah, sure. Somebody who's quite energetic, a lot of you know, bandwidth. I was at a, career, life stage where I didn't have kids and you know, like that bit kind of in the few years after uni hadn't settled down yet.
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Loads of energy for work, just say yes to everything. You know, sometimes that led me to be crying at my desk like, I can't do all of this, but that's a storey for another day. Versus what I observed of that colleague who was claiming that I had taken all of her opportunities was that she typically said no to things like, can you help out with graduations?
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No. Can you help out with open days? No. Can you, you know, do you want to get involved in this thing? She was like, well, what's in it for me? And you know, that kind of stuff. She would just generally was giving out signals all over the place that indicated that she didn't really want to get involved in anything.
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She wasn't volunteering for stuff, she was happy to do her job. She did her job really well to a good standard, but she wasn't going the extra mile. She wasn't trying to prove anything to anybody. And that's fine. You know, there's definitely space for that and we need people in, you know, we need for it to be okay in teams, for that to be okay and for there to be space for people who are showing up and doing a great job and not looking for anything more, that's absolutely fine.
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But the calling bit for me was then turning around and telling me that I had stolen all of her opportunities. It's like, well, love, if you'd said yes to some stuff, some people might have given you the opportunities they invited me to. And I think there are definitely systemic issues with how those opportunities are, dished out or how people are invited to participate in those opportunities.
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You know, often it's selective and there can often be a sense of favouritism for those people who are in a position to say yes. But what it really reinforced for me was just that awareness that you need to be considerate of the signals that you're sending out to people about what you're open to.
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And in addition to that, I've had a couple of experiences in more recent years with private one to one coaching clients where they've been thinking about career progression and once, once they've identified what the career opportunities are that they want, even if it's quite difficult to imagine the move from where they are to where they want to get to, as soon as they start talking about it with people, other people get involved in joining up the dots and going, I know someone who does something like that, or oh, I know someone who's got an opportunity for that or you know, maybe it's not exactly going to show up in the format that you wanted, but often things start to align.
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You start to get experience or opportunities or connections to things that you wouldn't have got if you hadn't been saying to people that that's what you were looking for. A particular example comes to mind of someone I didn't end up working with actually we had a taster session coaching one to one and she said, you know, really what I really noticed actually is I want to move into this other type of work.
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It was like she'd been doing work as like an executive assistant or something like that. I can't really remember, it was a few years ago, but she's been doing a particular type of work. And then she was like, I really want to get into like data analysis. I don't really know anything about that.
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I just, anytime there's a spreadsheet to work and I love it, so I love to get into that and I don't know how to do that because I'm not really qualified. I don't have any skills, haven't really done any courses or anything beyond just anytime there's a spreadsheet I'm rolling my sleeves up and asking Google how to do whatever it is that we need to do.
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And I said, well, you know, can you, who can you talk to about that? Where does that type of work happen in your institution? Anyway? It turns out she had a chat with her boss and she said this is what she wanted and she gave it quite a long time horizon.
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She said, obviously I'm not looking to leave right now. I'm just thinking about what my opportunities might be and how I can map a course from here to having that kind of a job. Guess what her boss said? She's like, oh, I was just chatting to the director of IT the other day.
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They were saying they were looking for somebody to come in at a sort of apprenticeshipy type of level. It's to do data analysis and that there's somebody in the team who really wants to have some line management experience but they don't have that experience yet.
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So they're looking for somebody who could come in and report to this person. She was like, oh, do you think I could do that? Sure enough, next, between the taster session and when she got back to me about the coaching, she had a conversation with the Director of IT.
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They'd said, oh, this sounds perfect. She had a secondment set up. She did have to take a pay cut, to take that role, responsibility, but it gave her so much experience that she wouldn't have developed otherwise.
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And then I haven't really kept in touch with this. I don't know where she is now. I might look her up, actually, after recording this, But then, you know, her career progressed off, moved off in that direction, which was completely unforeseeable before we had that taster session. In the end, she said, you know what?
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I don't think I need the coaching. That taster session gave me everything I needed, so happy days. So all of that is to say, I do think there is some right place, right time stuff going on, but I also think we have quite a bit more control over the narrative, as the question asked.
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And that is in firstly identifying really clearly in our own mind or, with a coach or a mentor or somebody who can support you, colleague, if a particular partner or colleague, identifying for yourself what are the opportunities that you want and then finding ways to signal that you're open.
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Really, really key. You have to signal openness. If you're signalling closedness. Closedness, is that even a word? If you're signalling that you're not open to opportunities and you say no to everything and you're not asking for exposure to particular opportunities or you're not asking for sponsorship, how, can you possibly expect anybody to give you those opportunities or to help you to make those connections and move in that direction?
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So there you go. That's my long winded answer to that question. If you would like some support from me in figuring that stuff out, check out the show notes below. I'll put links to my website and you can find out all about how to join my programmes and find out ways to work with me.
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If that doesn't feel right, but you love this kind of chat, just stay tuned. I'll be posting a new episode very soon. All right, take good care of when I speak to you next time. Bye.
