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What is the relevance of high-level, specialist academic achievement to a career in business or the public service? A broad question, open to broad debate, which might be characterised as 'knowledge versus know-how'. Which is more important?
Peter Latham, who now heads a team tasked with delivering HM Customs and Excise's Strategy to combat alcohol fraud, can certainly offer pointers on both sides.
Latham took a science degree at Bristol University in the mid-1990s and followed this up with a PhD in Cancer research at the University of East Anglia. He was then awarded a Research Fellowship in Medicine at Harvard University, returned to the UK to take up a Research Associate post at Manchester University and subsequently decided on a career change - opting for a Fast Tracked career in the Civil Service.
"I don't need this scientific knowledge in my current career," he says. "I move jobs within the Department roughly every six months and have to absorb fresh technical information each time. Now I'm in effect a project leader in an important area of tax revenue policy."
So was all that study and knowledge a waste of time?
"Not at all," Peter Latham says. "At the simplest level, it helped me through selection for the Fast Track scheme for HMCE. And no doubt the disciplined thinking and honing of deductive processes so vital for academic work are also very valuable in other areas."
But for a more general career wasn't his academic background a sort of intellectual overkill?
"I think the intellectual challenge in the work I've moved into is greater than in science because it calls on a much wider range of skills. In science, and particularly in research, the emphasis is on detail, an intense, penetrating but nevertheless narrowing focus, highly objective.
"Now I have a much more varied and fast-moving set of challenges. There's detail of course, but very often involving people rather than just data. And always, in achieving anything, the need to influence other people's views, communicate ideas across different technologies, understand political nuances and build relationships.
"Moving from what was, in effect, an exclusively high-tech background, I realised that I needed to bolster my toolbox of skills."
Like many others, sensing the gap, Peter Latham wasn't at once able to define it. But an initial urge to find out more about how to foster creative processes in the workplace, particularly when under pressure, led him to the 'Releasing Creativity' course at Jo Ouston & Co. Taking home a number of new skills that could apply directly in the workplace, Latham then looked for a course that could assist in his communication skills and personal presence.
"When I signed on for the Developing Personal Presence programme at Jo & Co I didn't have a list of specific objectives," Latham says. "But I had the broad aim of improving my ability to walk into new disciplines and groups of people equipped with the skills and presence to be seen as credible. The stuff I have to deal with at work can be complex but that wasn't my problem. I needed the confidence and communication skills to convey my arguments, both upwards and across teams, not just on content but by building rapport with the people concerned. This was where the Jo & Co course was so interesting."
But did it work?
"I suppose it would be easy to come over as someone different for a while, but that sort of thing has no depth and just doesn't last. What I got was something more powerful, ideas and techniques I can work with and build on. I'm conscious now of how I should be doing things. With practice this can become sub-conscious, a genuine part of me, and that way the lessons of the course will be long-lasting."
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