My career so far - Part 1

I want to start including more lifestyle posts and I'm beginning with a mini series :)  This is all about my career so far and will be in a few parts, you might want to grab a cuppa before you read on ;)

The Education Years

Casting my mind back to 1995, I'm in my final year of school and doing my GCSE's, I don't really know what I want to do with my life, all I know is it'll be something to do with art.  Art (at this point) was ruling my life.  I leave school with my GCSE's and enrol at the local collage to do a GNVQ Intermediate in Art & Design - despite having a strong portfolio they'd only let me do the Intermediate level as I didn't have a GCSE in art - thanks Reading college!

I waste a year of my life in a college where the lecturers have no clue what they're doing - they're all fresh out of uni and have no real experience.  For the most part we were left to our own devices, so after about 10 months I've had enough and I quit.  A few months later we move from Reading (Berkshire) to Pembrokeshire (West Wales).  I still want to pursue my career in art so I head to the local college and see about doing the Advanced GNVQ in art & design, this time I walk onto the course and am surrounded by inspirational lecturers and amazing students that are actually nice to me :)  These 2 years were a turning point in my life, I changed from being a really unhappy 17 year old to being a very happy and smiley 17 year old :)

During those 2 years I realise my strengths in art are fine art and graphic design - I felt I'd have potential for a better career if I follow the design path, so I apply to do the Graphic Communication BA in UWIC in Cardiff - I receive an unconditional offer.  After not preparing (saving) at all for leaving home and going to uni I realise I need to take a year out before I go to save up some money to go with.  A year passes by and I'm ready to go to uni.

September 1999 I start my degree.  I was so excited and petrified at the same time, but I was finally independent   With this came a difficult period of my life as I became really really home sick, which impacted on how well I was doing in my work, but I struggled through and eventually made some amazing friends, some of which are still my closest friends nearly 15 years on.  Things don't go great for me at uni and I end up leaving half way through my final year (that's a blog post in it's own right!).  This is where my career starts.

My first full time job

Yeah during my year off I worked full time in the local pub, but that wasn't a 'proper' job, and by that I mean, for me it wasn't a career.  Freshly out of uni and with no work but a lot of bills and just days before my student loan was due (which was cancelled due to leaving uni) I started applying for jobs.  I'd met Chris about 2 months ago and his best friend worked for Legal & General - he suggested I apply for a job there as it was ok money and could be a career.

I apply, wait several weeks and hear nothing.  I head to a pay phone (yeah, I couldn't afford to use my mobile!) and chase them up, seems my application had been 'overlooked' so they invite me for an interview.  I get the job, whoop!  I start on £10k a year and only do 35hrs a week, I love it!  For me this job was only ever going to be a 6 month job, at the end of that 6 months I'd head back to uni to resit the final year.  But as the 6 months go by I realise I can't stop working - I have bills & debts to pay and if I stop working full time I won't be able to keep up the repayments, so I make the decision not to return.  This decision I regret more than any decision I've made in my life.

I move on and throw myself into my work, I'm underwriting life insurance applications and doing really well.  Two years pass by and an internal job crops up to work in our in house learning library and pretty much run it.  I swiftly apply, go through a couple of interviews and get the job.  There was so much I loved about this job, I got to re-organise the entire library and come up with a new system for archiving and storing everything, I built web pages to host the entire catalogue of resources we had, I held team sessions in there introducing them to how the centre can support them in their jobs and I head out to other sites in the UK to promote the library.  But, I had a difficult relationship with my manager which made the job really quite stressful.  I started applying for external jobs, I'd get interviews but then they'd want to speak to my boss for a reference, at that point I'd be told I didn't get the job.

All photo's are my own artwork which are on my portfolio site

But after 5 years doing that job, and 7 years working in the company I get the news that they're closing the learning library and making me redundant.  It was the worst news... I cried and cried... one of the worst things was how I was told. I wasn't taken into a room and told individually, no, I was taken to a room with the rest of the people in my department, shown a slide with our people structure on, then shown another slide of how the department will look in a few months and I simply wasn't on it.  I had a mortgage I'd just taken up and bills to pay, this was 1 year into the recession in 2009.

To find out what happened next, keep your eyes peeled for Part 2 :)

This months Bigest-Pixi3 advertiser is the lovely Shang from The Feminine Crusade

 

Written by Georgina Kent