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Gillian Hughes may be the exemplar of a
21st century career. When she spoke about her work with Jo Ouston &
Co in 1995, she found herself "with three degrees (BA, MA and MBA)
and a strong itch to be on the move", but with a clearer idea of
things she did not want to do and a much less well defined one of what
she did want. She said then "The value of what was coming through
on the Jo Ouston course was understanding my own motivations, the things
I enjoyed doing, the buzz factor." These started giving direction
to her thoughts.
At the time, Gillian Hughes had moved rapidly from charity administration,
through personnel management in the health service, to training roles
with Mobil Oil in continental Europe , then as a business analyst with
Mobil in the UK.
When she spoke to us recently she described a stimulating series of moves,
first with Mobil in a pan-European IT role, then with Price Waterhouse
Consulting, specialising in SAP software installations in various countries.
"I was doing well," she says. "No doubt about it, and enjoying
almost everything about my work - intellectual challenge, good conditions,
brilliant colleagues. It had most of the things I had identified in my
sessions with JO as being important to me. But one element was missing
- the feeling of a fixed point of reference and a group of people who
would go on being around. In consulting, when the project changed, the
team changed."
Gillian Hughes went to JO & Co again two years ago with this problem.
"We talked it through. I realised I was missing 'an anchor' in my
career. It was then I was able to make the decision, with some reluctance,
to leave Price Waterhouse and move to the German company, SAP, who provide
the software we were installing for our clients."
Now Gillian Hughes has assembled all the elements she spotted in her first
programme with Jo Ouston and Co. She has always used the first three -
working in a cosmopolitan environment, being among people who regard asking
questions as a positive quality, and providing variety in its challenges
- as guidelines in making career decisions. Now she has added consistency
of location and colleagues.
When we commented on her remarkable transformation from soft-skill practitioner
in low-tech work like charity administration to hard-skill, high-tech
operator, Gillian Hughes pointed out that "communication is by far
the most important part of my job, the skill I need most. My role is essentially
liaison, understanding the needs of the business people and communicating
them to the technicians. I don't think of myself as technical, though
I have to understand the fundamentals. But my attributes are still the
ones I had seven, eight years ago - a capacity to ask the right questions
and an instinct for exposition. Whatever success I have had has been due
to recognising these and having the confidence to work with them as core
skills.
Nothing is more important at work than knowing what you have, and having
the chutzpah to use it."
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Copyright Jo Ouston & Company Limited 2000-2008
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