Women Managing for the Millennium. Sally Garratt

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СКАЧАТЬ and keen to stay in Hong Kong, but my husband wanted to come home. I had been away for five or six years and felt very out of touch – the sort of things I had been doing were not to be found in the UK. My first mistake was to work with a bunch of cowboys who were establishing a rehabilitation centre. When I realized what they were up to, the matron and I left on the same day.

      ‘When I later became founding director of a medical charity, the entrepreneurial side of me enjoyed that very much, but the experience was marred by the macho power games always going on. There was only one woman on the board, and there were many conflicts of interests. It is a myth that charity trustees are driven only by altruism. Aware of a crying need for specialists who understand the voluntary sector, two colleagues and I set up a consultancy which offers advice to charities on strategic planning, marketing, trustee selection, training and forth. I did this for three years and am still actively involved, but I missed the hands-on operational side of work and decided to return to being a charity director. In 1995 I was recruited to head up the British Vascular Foundation. Raising funds, launching appeals and so forth – all these involve my skills as a businesswoman and marketing professional.’

Lack of career guidance and career goals

      What goals? All too often, at the beginning of their working lives, women have not set themselves clear goals; or, in the case of many women over the past three decades, ‘did not recognize I was setting out on a career’. Although the situation has improved over the last ten years, I still hear many women talking about their schools and the expectations (or lack of them) for the female pupils. The family environment and the school careers advice often reinforced the idea that some kind of professional training (nursing, secretarial, teaching), or perhaps university, would be followed by marriage, homemaking and motherhood as sure as night follows day. What was rare was the chance to look beyond that scenario and consider the different options, including following a life-long career, of not necessarily getting married, of possibly not having children, of changing track if the first choice didn’t work out, or of pursuing several different types of employment.

      The paradox here is that in the 1960s and 1970s, when this attitude was still prevalent, there were plenty of jobs for everyone. As Beverley points out, ‘One of the most significant changes from when I was at school and the present day is that we knew we could get a job. That doesn’t happen now.’

      Theresa went to ‘a wonderful girls’ school where everyone assumed you would all do very well – which usually meant working for a few years, marrying and having children. If you were outrageously clever, you might carry on doing something as long as the children didn’t suffer. I knew of only one woman who went out to work. She was something in the Treasury and this was much derided. It probably meant that the children didn’t have puddings during the week!’ Theresa also talks about the conflicting assumptions made by the school and the outside world. ‘Until I was sixteen I was under the delusion that you set your sights on Cambridge or somewhere like that, but I was told that Cambridge was not the sort of place that girls went to. It was full of boys and not right for girls. That was the prevailing wisdom and before I heard that it had never crossed my mind that boys and girls were treated differently’.

      Julia was privately educated in the 1970s at a school which assumed that women would have a career, and university was both expected and encouraged. Paradoxically, it was Oxford which let her down. She found the University and the Career advisers to be of virtually no help in offering her guidance about what she should do after her degree.

      Alison, on the other hand, also privately educated, fared differently again. She found that her school had few expectations for its pupils beyond working as a secretary, teacher or nurse and waiting for Mr Right to come along.

      Women who went to mixed-sex schools reported on different experiences. One woman mentioned that she was fortunate enough to be one of seven particularly bright girls in her year and they were encouraged to perform well in class and in exams. She is not so sure that the same would have happened if she had been the only girl with academic aspirations in her form.

      Another talked of being very competitive and sporty when at a mixed school and about how she was more likely to be found playing hockey with the boys than netball with the girls. This was frowned upon by the staff and she had to work extra hard to be allowed to enjoy the things she wanted to do as opposed to the things that others thought she ought to do.

      Nearly all the women I spoke to mentioned the lack of a range of possibilities offered to them by careers advisers. Sarah who, against great difficulties, did well in her O and A levels, looks back with disappointment at the advice she was given. ‘No one ever mentioned PR to me. I also wish that someone had suggested being a magazine editor – I would have loved to have aimed for that.’

      The lack of appropriate career guidance at school is still cited as one of the most common obstacles to making the most appropriate job choice for the future, although the service does seem to be improving in some schools. The Institute of Management’s 1997 report (A Question of Balance – see here) found that 25% of the managers in the survey felt that their careers had been hindered in some way by a lack of appropriate guidance. When young people are faced with making important, life-shaping decisions about their futures, the range of choices must seem overwhelming. Well-known and recognized job titles, professions, trades and industries are joined by a whole host of other options which are not so familiar and about which little information is given. But, with the increasing use of computer-based questionnaires to help students find out more about their strengths and weaknesses and to point them in the direction of possible careers and, with easy access to databases, it is now comparatively simple to discover which subjects they need to study to follow a particular interest.

      It is not difficult to find out which universities and colleges have the best reputations for specific subjects, or how the relevant courses and their faculties differ from one another. Inevitably, however, there is a limit to the depth of available information and students are often unaware of the entire range of possibilities offered by their preferred subjects. Because of this they are not always able to choose the most appropriate courses, or the ones which would suit them best. It seems to me that the present, rather limited approach to careers guidance is not helpful, particularly now when the possibilities of pursuing a job for life are not high.

      The world of work is changing very quickly – much more rapidly than most adults from the conventional world of the professions and nine to five jobs realize. The traditional concept of a ‘career’ is disappearing and many representatives of the present and future student generations are more than likely to change direction several times during their working lives. The idea of a portfolio career – not relying on one single area of work or skill to generate income – is growing in popularity: especially when employees no longer feel they can rely on a company to provide them with the security that used to be seen as an employer’s duty to the workforce. Changes in companies’ policies which lead to redundancies or redeployment of resources mean that people are becoming used to the idea of additional training or re-training in order to fill another position within the organization or to find work elsewhere. This will become quite normal and the people who will fare best in an unstable job market are those who learn to be flexible and who develop a range of skills, knowledge and experience.

      To this end, career consultants are beginning to emerge who offer a complementary service which can be used alongside the more traditional mechanical approach and which begins the process of thinking about the world of work in a new and exciting way. This approach looks at what kind of organizations the students want to work with, what kind of lifestyle they aspire to, and how they will measure personal success. It concentrates less on a specific area of work or profession and more on what the individual student hopes to give to and receive from his or her working life. Students can then begin to clarify the direction they wish to follow and also take the chance to СКАЧАТЬ