My original career ambition was to be a history teacher, but in the early 90s, as history was being deprioritised from the curriculum, it became clear that by the end of my training I would have limited job opportunities.
My first career pivot was into retail, as produce manager at Tesco, followed by a move to Sainsbury’s and their graduate training scheme in retail buying. I climbed the ranks and my commercial career flourished. Food retail is exciting and fast paced, but what really fascinated me was what went on behind the scenes, the inner workings of the business and how different cultures worked.
Following a stint at Safeway, I switched to the B2B sector and joined Bidfood, a wholesale distribution business, as a commercial buyer. I continued to climb the career ladder, spending some time at a sister company in the Netherlands, which provided valuable insight into different brands in different markets.
In 2010, I returned to the UK and to Bidfood, who presented me with a new challenge: to lead a digital transformation project. I had to research what was needed, develop a strategy and, if the board approved it, to build it. To be honest, this is the project that got me into the digital space. The biggest challenge wasn’t building the technology, it was getting organisations to learn to love it and not see it as a threat.
It was around this time I realised I needed to learn more about devising and influencing business strategy. I had my commercial career experience from large organisations, but I needed a greater theoretical and academic framework to validate what I was doing.
With the support of Bidfood, who paid half of the fees, I enrolled on The Open University’s MBA programme, and for the next three years, spent every evening, weekend and holiday at my desk working hard on the course. Luckily, my partner was doing the same programme, and the fact that we empathised with each other helped us both through it.
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, which was every bit as rigorous as my earlier university courses, but was delighted to find I had greater access to the tutors than at a physical university. When I encountered some challenges with the corporate finance course, my tutor was fantastic at providing the help and support that I needed. Thinking back to my undergraduate days, I would not have had that time with a tutor. I even got to attend summer schools in Berlin and London, great opportunities to meet your peers and your tutors who you’d previously only seen or spoken to virtually.
The hard work paid off. I came out with a distinction, and won a Student of the Year award, scoring highest marks of my peer group. It was good to know that in my 40s I could still hack it.
By now, I was certain that the next stage of my career would be in digital and the business strategy around it, and that my MBA would be my route into that. In 2015, I started thinking about a move into digital consultancy. I could see other companies going through the same challenges that I’d faced with Bidfood’s digital transformation. That experience, plus my MBA, gave me the credibility to get out there and really help those companies with their own transformational journey.
I had already done some consultancy work with Inviqa when they asked me to join them full-time. They had realised that, as well as their digital solutions, they needed to offer clients business consultancy services and asked me to develop them.
I’ve been at Inviqa for three years now, working with businesses across a range of sectors, including media, e-commerce, retail and publishing, helping them understand how to go about making a change on such a massive scale and how it would impact the organisation before they started to implement new digital technology. This is the career I knew I wanted, and my MBA has been instrumental in achieving it.
As technology continues to transform the world of work, continued learning and development will become more important, even vital, to your long-term career prospects. What you learned in your 20s may no longer be relevant to your job in your 40s, 50s and even 60s. I’m 48 and enjoying another new career. With good planning, hard work and a clear sense of where you want to go, you can achieve career success, doing what you love, whatever age you are.
