Hey! You don’t belong here!

In early 2018 I wrote an hour-long workshop for PhD students, titled ‘Impostor Syndrome: how to recognise it and combat it in academic career paths.’

It went down a storm; every single participant fed back that at least one of the techniques I’d talked about was helpful, and overall the feeling was that I’d used my expertise as a Careers Professional appropriately on this incredibly troubling topic.

I suspect, therefore, that most of the people in attendance would have been somewhat surprised to discover that throughout the entire session, a little voice in my head kept telling me, over and over, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re making it up. You’re a fraud.

The thing is, professionally I’ve very often felt like a fraud. In part, this is because of the way I’ve managed my career - until I found the Careers Guidance profession, my general ambition was just ‘will this pay my rent and bills and will it keep me not entirely bored?’

I handled job applications by skimming the details and asking myself ‘do I reckon I could give this a go?’ and if the answer was yes, I’d apply.

In some ways this served me well - I kept getting jobs, after all, but in other ways it wasn’t the ideal choice. For one thing, it means that between my first ever paid job (café waitress, 2006) to now, I can lay claim to a grand total of eighteen jobs in fourteen years. If we look purely at post-graduation, that’s still eight jobs in eight years.

Some of those I had at the same time - for example, I was a volunteer ‘foster carer’ in two different job roles for four years, which I did alongside each other and my days jobs (of which the volunteering spanned three different ones). Also, following a period of covering maternity leave in one role, the post holder returned to work part time, so the department kept me part time in the role I’d been covering and offered me another part time role in the team doing something different too. And, in 2016 when I became a Careers Adviser and began studying for my professional qualifications, I didn’t know that within a year I’d be stepping up into the Senior role to cover someone else’s maternity leave.

Still, eight job titles, eight years. There’s a lot of interviews there, and pre-employment checks and mandatory training and meeting a new team and smiling and nodding and in my head all the time thinking shit shit shit I have no idea what I’m doing.

• I didn’t know what I was doing when a customer came into the bank I was a Cashier in and asked to deposit a £50,000 probate cheque - because I didn’t know what probate meant at the time.

• I didn’t know what I was doing when I had to do immigration HR checks for the NHS, because I'd had no training in the immigration rules.

• I didn’t know what I was doing when I began working for the Visa and Compliance team at a university because I still hadn’t done any immigration rules training, but I had used my experience of checking passports for the NHS as a means of proving my ability to do so.

• Also, I genuinely didn’t know what I was doing in my first Careers Adviser job. Not at first.

My training, before I started the professionally accredited PgDip, consisted of one colleague who had started at the university on the same day I’d moved to this new department sitting with me at a picnic bench in the late September sunshine, with a Post-It note. In each of the four corners she’d annotated - ‘C’, ‘Cl’, ‘Ex’ and ‘AP’. Contract, clarify, explore and action plan.

I kept that note in my pocket for about three months, pulling it out before every 1:1 appointment to remind myself how to manage the 15 or 45 minute appointment slot I was about to head into.

No one really taught me at all how to deliver a workshop or lecture session. I learned by observing some colleagues (but there were only a small number of us and a whole university to Careers Advise, so this wasn’t exactly a slow induction) and by going on a couple of networking events and asking other Careers Professionals what they did.

I also thought to myself, ‘if I was a student, what could I be bothered to listen to?’ and tried to make my sessions interactive, engaging, full of energy.

It worked - by the time I left that university I’d been the Senior Careers Adviser for two years and had a pretty excellent reputation across the whole institution. People came to me to ask my advice about how we should embed careers education in the curriculum. I was invited on panels with senior management teams. I worked 45-60 hour weeks depending on the time of year and trained a bunch of people along the way. I loved it, and in the end became confident enough to admit when I was winging it - I treated it like a charming point of pride; after all, you have to know your subject well if you’re going to be able to wing it, right?

And then I got a new job. Careers Consultant, which is indication that no one actually knows what terminology best suits what we offer in Higher Education Careers Services, but as a general rule you’re a ‘careers adviser’ or ‘employability adviser’ at post-92s and Careers Consultants at Russell Groups and red bricks.

So, this university was much fancier. More focused, too - a narrower set of subjects than the 58 I’d been in charge of at the old place. A bigger team too - still diddy by Russell Group standards but easily triple the size of the team I worked with before. Also, between my colleagues there was probably also triple the experience level.

And this was amazing for me. So many people to learn from! So many opportunities to share ideas and get support! They’re also one of the loveliest bunches of people I could ask to work with - there is a sense of community in the team, the kind that means when we all started working from home it was only natural we’d develop a Friday Night Zoom habit. It doesn’t even feel forced - something I think a LOT of teams would be bloody lucky to emulate.

But.

I suspect you know what’s coming - because I suspect you’ve felt this yourself. I really do think it’s probably universal (except maybe for politicians?). I began to have some questions. Like,

‘What if I’m not as good as everyone else?’

‘What if I was only a big fish in a little pond before, and everything I thought I was good at… was a lie?’

And - worse than that - ‘what if someone notices?’

Fortunately, I’m big enough and ugly enough at this stage in my life to recognise these thoughts for what they are and to confront them head on. I told my manager I was feeling a little bit insecure in one of my meetings with him, and he assured me that everyone feels like that sometimes (which, honestly, I knew) and then he explained why he’s assembled the team he has. We all have our places, our purposes, and we’re an excellent team.

That was amazing at stamping out my impostor syndrome in this job, that sense that we’re all in it together.

It’s a lot harder when you’re feeling that way in something that only you’re part of - and I’ll be talking about that in the next post, when I discuss my Impostor Syndrome vs. Being A Writer.