Episode 79 -Trying 25 jobs by age 25, with Emma Rosen

December 22, 2018 Podcast

Hello and welcome to the 79th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast, and I’ve got a cracker for you today. Ever thought about a few different jobs and wondered what it would be like to try them out? Well my guest today did just that and then some. I’m joined by Emma Rosen, author of the new book ‘The Radical Sabbatical’, where she describes how she quit her dream job with the civil service fast stream to embark on an adventure to try 25 different jobs by the age 25. It’s an inspiring episode on many levels. In it Emma shares the emotions of getting the job of her dreams on the civil service fast stream and the inner turmoil she went through as she quit not long after, when she realised it wasn’t for her. She explores the background to embarking on 25 different jobs by the age of the 25 and how she went about getting those all important work placements. She shares brilliant insights into the mind-set, skills and approach needed to get work experience with any company, and why you shouldn’t be put off by thinking that it is a competitive industry that you are applying to. She also reveals her insider secrets of exactly what you need to do when you approach a company so that you get that vital yes to work experience. No matter where you are on your job search or if you haven’t thought about getting work experience or trying a work placement, this is an episode you aren’t going to want to miss. Now don’t worry about trying to remember everything you hear today, as a full transcript of today’s show and all the links we discuss can be found over in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/25. From there you will also find links to all of the other 78 episodes of the show which cover every aspect of getting a graduate job, from help with interviews, assessment centres, to specific companies, to finding a job you love, to dealing with stress as you look for a graduate job. If it’s graduate job related, I have an episode on it. And If I haven’t got an episode on a subject, let me know and I will record one.

And don’t forget to check out today’s sponsor who are our friends over at CareerGym.com. Career Gym is the number one place for you to undertake all of your psychometric tests which you will face when you apply for a graduate job. No matter what graduate job you apply for you’re going to have to face some type of verbal reasoning, situational judgment, and working style tests. You can practice these at CareerGym.com. Use code GJP to get 20% off all of their tests!

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • How Emma managed to pack in 25 work placements by the age 25
  • Emma’s brilliant method of contacting and approaching companies that proved so successful in getting her work experience placements
  • How to utilise work placements to shape and steer your career
  • Why the fact that an industry is competitive should spur you on and not scare you off
  • Why perseverance is so important when you are trying to get work experience
  • How working on an alpaca farm changed Emma’s views about what she wants from a career
  • How to impress and make the most of work placements

SELECTED LINKS INCLUDE:

  • Emma’s website
  • Emma on Twitter
  • Emma on Instagram
  • Grad Touch  – Emma’s website recommendation
  • Emma’s 1st book recommendation – ‘What Colour is Your Parachute?’

  • Emma’s 2nd recommendation – ‘How to Find Fulfilling Work’

Transcript – Episode 79 – Trying 25 jobs by age 25, with Emma Rosen

James Curran: I’m very pleased to welcome Emma Rosen to the show, author of the upcoming book, “The Radical Sabbatical: The Millennial Handbook to the Quarter Life Crisis”. Emma, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Emma Rosen: Thank you very much for having me.

James: And you’ve had such an interesting and jam-packed career so far, and we’re going to explore that in more detail on this show today. But, maybe before we start, do you want to just introduce yourself to the listeners and how you came to be writing the book, the Radical Sabbatical.

Emma: Yeah, sure. So, I left university. I went onto the Civil Service Fast Stream, which is a government’s graduate scheme, and quite quickly realized it wasn’t fitting me, but was left wondering what on earth is. And after having a little bit of an existential crisis at 24, I decided to go and try 25 different jobs in a year before my 25th birthday, which obviously works out at about roughly one every two weeks, and they were really, really diverse. So, some were really traditional, professional careers and others were completely at the other end of the spectrum.

So, I spent a year doing that and I completed the project about a year ago, and I’ve written a book about it and what I’ve learned from it and also how you can apply a similar methodology to your own life if you don’t know what it is that you want to do, whether that’s as a student still or whether that’s as a graduate already in a graduate job, and you’re not feeling loved, but you have no idea what you should be doing instead. This is a book about how to figure that out and kind of really takes you through, in detail, the steps of going through that process.

James: Excellent. And wow, that’s, as I said, a jam-packed career already. So, let’s just break that down into different bits. You said you got a job on the very highly-coveted and much applied to Civil Service Fast Stream, so that’s many people listening’s dream to get on that. How is it that you spent all that energy, you got a place in it, and what just didn’t feel right when you got there?

Emma: It was my dream job too and it took me, I think, two or three go’s to get on the scheme. So, I totally remember feeling like it was something that was so unachievable and glamorized for me. But, I think that was exactly it, that it was glamorized, and I think this is possibly true of grad schemes in general.

I think there’s a lot of budget that goes into the marketing, but I think you need to make sure that you know what you’re really getting yourself into and kind of understanding what goes on in a job on a day-to-day basis and learning what the highs and the lows and the ups and the downs are before you actually go into it.

And I think that’s why I spent so much time now focusing on work experience, is the whole idea of you try it before you buy it. You actually go away and understand what it is that that job entails before you commit to, say, four years of doing it.

So, I think, for me, the Fast Stream, I think I’m just not the sort of person that worked well on a grad scheme. I’m not good at having a really prescribed career path, so you’re given a placement, and that’s what you go and do, and you do that kind of several different ones over the space of four years, and that’s that.

And I guess what I realized was that I want to be the one that’s in control of my own career, which means that a grad scheme probably isn’t the right path for me. But, obviously it took me going away and doing that to realize that that was the answer. So, yeah it wasn’t right for me. I think the Civil Service, more widely, probably was, but the way that the grad scheme worked at the time, and I think this must be different now because obviously this was three’ish years ago was that you’re either on the Fast Stream or you’re not in the Civil Service. So, for me, that meant I’m going to try something else instead then.

But, one point that I think is really important to make is that you want different things at different stages in your life, and that wasn’t right for me at that stage in my life, but in 10 years’ time, it absolutely might be when my priorities are different. So, I don’t think it’s a reflection, so much, of a negative experience with the Civil Service or the Fast Stream. I think it’s just it wasn’t right for me at the time of my life, and it was just about being, I guess, either bold or naive enough to actually run with that decision and actually embrace that.

James: “Bold’s” a really good word because I speak to many people I coach, and they’re in jobs that they’re not happy with, and often, as you said, the marketing maybe portrays a different side of the work than you’ll actually be doing, and I do sometimes find that people don’t really put the work in to speak to people who are actually doing the job to find out what it’s really like, and there’s a big difference between speaking to people and finding out what they’ll actually do as opposed to the shiny brochure which looks very exciting and can be very different to what real life is actually like.

And just as a plug, it’s one of the things I’m going to explore in the upcoming episode on the pros and cons of going for a graduate scheme, so stay tuned for that one. So, Emma how long were you into the Civil Service Fast Stream before that feeling in your stomach really started to kick in that this wasn’t the right place for you?

Emma: I think it was about two weeks. I very quickly realized that this is probably not such a good idea. But, because of, I guess, the prestige and the status of getting onto it, I felt a huge sense of guilt that I wasn’t enjoying it. I felt very, very ungrateful and undeserving of the opportunity that I’ve been given, and I was very much aware of how hard it was to get onto and how hard it had been for me to get onto it, and I kind of felt really confused about why I was so unhappy that yet in such a good job, on the surface, on paper, it ticked every single box I’ve ever wanted in a job.

And it took the best part of the year to kind of work through those emotions and those feelings to kind of figure out what was actually going on and why wasn’t I enjoying it, and this isn’t the be all and end all. It took a long time to work through that kind of going from, “I hate this, but I just need to suck it up. This is just work. Work’s not meant to be a pleasant thing to do. Why am I expecting it to be a good thing?” which obviously now I know is not the case at all.

But, at the time, I kind of just felt, “I’ve got such an opportunity here. How could I possibly throw it away just because I don’t like it?” It made me feel like I was very fickle. But, again I think not liking your job, it doesn’t matter how old you are. If you really hate your job, you really hate your job, and those feelings that come with that, it doesn’t matter if you’re in your 50’s and having a midlife crisis, say, or if you’re in your 20’s and having a quarter-life crisis. You get the same range of emotions, and I think when you’re in a job and you hate it so much that it’s affecting your mental health, you should not carry on doing that.

I get contacted quite regularly by young people that are in jobs that they hate, and they’re in counseling because of it. And I think it should not get that bad. It should never get that bad that it’s genuinely impacting the rest of your life, which mine was, and it kind of got to a breaking point and I realized it was affecting my relationships with my friends, my family, it was affecting my mental health, and I was like, “You know what? This is going too far. This is not how it was meant to be,” and I guess I just decided to do something about it, really.

I have a bit of a theory in that the extent that you hate your job, the more you hate your job, the less planning you’re going to do about how you’re going to leave it. If you don’t mind it too much, you’ll do later planning and figure out a really good course of action. If you’re towards the desperation rather than the inspiration, and then I think you’ll just leave and you’ll figure the rest out at some point.

So, there was definitely an element of that for me, but obviously, I ended up coming up with an idea that carried on and changed my path quite significantly, I guess.

James: And in terms of that breaking point, was there an a-ha moment where you thought, “That’s it. I’m done,” and did you walk out the door, or did you not go in the next day, or was it a fit of pique that you just walked out?

Emma: Not directly. I mean, I think the realization came when I was on a holiday with some friends staying for the week. It was the first one they were taking in about a year. I spent the whole time thinking about work, and dreading work, and dreading to go back to work. And even though I was on holiday, the whole idea of work was still controlling my life and really had me in tears nearly every day on this holiday, and I realized, “This is too much. This is not how this is meant to be.”

And from that point, I then started thinking about what I would do instead, and then it just literally came down to one night of sitting on the couch being like, “What on earth am I going to do?” and I ended up coming up with this list, and I just, off the top of my head, wrote down all the different ideas that I had for careers over the years that I wanted to try and things that I kind of didn’t necessarily or hadn’t necessarily been seriously considering.

And there were things that had always been in the back of my head that I’d always wondered about, always been curious about, but perhaps had never had the opportunity to really explore them or they weren’t seen as real jobs: being a writer, for example. When you’re growing up, it’s like, “Oh, that’s not a real job.” I guess I wanted to — I put all those down on a list and decided to go and do them, pretty much and to kind of test all those assumptions to see if they were really true.

And this was just before my 24th birthday, and the idea of 25 jobs before turning 25 had quite a nice ring to it, and it kind of gave me a goal, an end date, which I found really helpful. It sounds silly, but it was kind of an excuse to go and do it, almost, because it had a set time frame.

So, it all happened quite quickly. I spent a couple of weeks building a website and trying to get the first few placements and I was quite lucky I got the first four placements in about a week. I got them organized. That serves as kind of a proof of concept or as validation that this might actually work. And then, yeah, I had to do my notice, and I had a month’s notice to work out, and I took two weeks. The last two weeks, annual leave holiday to go do the first placement, which was archaeology in Transylvania.

James: Quite different to commuting in the Northern line to the center of London to go work for the Civil Service.

Emma: Well, exactly, exactly, and that was before I’d even officially left, so it really set me up on the right path to be like, “This is the right thing for me to do right now.”

James: And were the Civil Service supportive or did it just sort of blow their mind that you’d want to leave?

Emma: I think plenty of my colleagues were really, really supportive. I think grad schemes, themselves, less so. I initially explored whether I could take a sabbatical, officially, to take a year off and then kind of leave the door open a little bit. But, obviously that didn’t happen. But, yeah I think most of my colleagues who went on the grad scheme were really, really supportive, to be honest. Some still read my blogs today. It was just really nice. I think there’s a lot of similar feelings in some of the people that I spoke to.

So, when I said that I was leaving, I got quite a few emails from colleagues saying, “I feel like that too,” of a total age range, not just young people. People would be up to nearing retirement. It was really noticeable, actually, and it made me realize — it was the first thing that made me realize I’m clearly not the only person that feels this way. There’s wider issues going on here across the workforce and not just with millennials, but that’s obviously the demographic that I’ve chosen to focus on, but I think it is a wider problem, definitely.

James: I can remember when I left my graduate scheme, and you send the email around saying you’re leaving, and you’re letting people know you’re leaving, and you get loads of responses from people like, “Oh yeah, I’m looking for another job as well,” or, “I’d really want to leave as well,” and it’s like the prison door is open. All you need to do is walk through it. There’s nothing chaining you to your current job or current careers. I bet there was a lot of jealous people on the grad scheme as well who envied you having the guts to take that big step and make the leap.

Emma: I never asked them that, to be honest, and they’ve not wanted to give information, but I think it’s difficult. I think it is definitely the right thing for some people, and I have friends that are still on it that I still see socially regularly and they’re doing really, really cool-sounding jobs. A lot of people are working on Brexit in healthcare and education, and I think it really is the right move for lots of people, but it’s just about being self-aware enough to know if it’s the right thing for you or not. And if it’s not, that’s okay, that’s fine.

But, it’s just, I think, very difficult when you’re a young person going to university, for example, and you can see what we appear and they’re all going towards the flashy, well-paid grad schemes, and you feel like you want to keep up and you want to be on par with them. So, I think it’s very easy to kind of go along with things and then you kind of wake up one day and realize that, actually, maybe that wasn’t the right decision for you after all.

James: So, how did you find the first placement, then, of archaeology in Transylvania?

Emma: So, I called up my old university’s archaeology department. I’d done about two modules in my first year in archaeology, so it was something I was interested in but didn’t actually have any experience of. And I just called up the professor and explained the project, and asked if they needed a helping hand on any excavations over the next year. He turned around and said, “Actually, we really need somebody to go to Transylvania in two weeks’ time. We’ll pay, don’t worry. Can you go?” I’m like, “Yeah, sure.”

I had to Google where Transylvania is, realizing it’s Romania, not having known that before at all. This seems to happen to me quite a lot, and it’s just the sort of thing that you just say yes to and ask questions later, and just don’t question it. Just go with the flow. And I did, and then two weeks later, I landed in an airport called Cluj-Napoca in Northern Romania and drove up into the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania and spent two weeks in a village that doesn’t even — like a Hamlet in the middle of the mountains working on excavating a Roman palace with a joint British and Romanian archaeology team. It was amazing. It was really, really great.

It was a lot of hard work the first few days with hard work just of literal digging trying to get deep enough to be at the right level underground of where the Roman level of artifacts were. And once we were down there, it was quite literally very stereotypically on your knees with a brush and a little trowel going through absolutely everything and finding coins, and hairpins, and floor tiles of hypocausts and all sorts of things. It was really fascinating, to be honest.

It was a very different relationship with history. I studied history at university. And going to a museum and seeing artifacts is very different to realizing that you’re the first person to hold something for 2,000 years. You’re the first person to see it since it got dropped under the floor or whatever happened, and it was incredible. It was really, really inspiring and very romantic, I think. I loved it.

James: Where did you move to for the second placement then?

Emma: I then did wedding photography, and I had an acquaintance who ran a small business in Ibiza doing wedding photography. I called her up and asked if I could go along. She said, “Yes, sure. You can sleep on my living room floor.” And I got the flights, and they were cheaper than my weekly commute would be, would cost from home to go into London to the office. So, it was actually cheaper for me to fly out to Ibiza and do that for a week than it was for me to stay in London, which is insane.

And then went to a wedding there and worked as her second photographer and learned all about PhotoShop and light room editing, and how to take photos in the right moments, and lenses. Again, photography was something that I had a very amateur interest in, and I have an SLR camera, a very old beaten-up one that I took with me, and just kind of learning how she does her job at what she does.

Her lifestyle, all the time, is effectively spending her spring and summer in Ibiza photographing weddings. She does like 40 a season, and photography for wedding is quite well-paid. And then spent the winter traveling around the world being a travel photographer, and it kind of funds the other side of her lifestyle, and that was incredible.

And it was just something I’d never heard of before, I’d never come across before, and that was one of the very first lessons, I think, of trying different things out was being exposed to so many other people’s lives and so many other people that just do things a bit differently, and it just goes to show you that not everybody has kind of a 9 to 5 office career.

There are a huge number of alternatives. It’s just that we aren’t exposed to them as much that we don’t see them, so we don’t really know they’re there until we go and explore and go and find out. That was her career, and to be honest, it sounds like a really good way to spend at least the first three years of your career. Yeah, it was awesome.

James: Amazing, and as you said, there’s so many different careers and lifestyles out there that people might not immediately think about or think that they’re able to do and just people get focused into specific ideas of what they need to be doing and where they need to be doing it, and don’t think that the world is a big place and there’s lots of cool, amazing jobs out there, a couple of which you’ve mentioned already. Was there a theme of the 25 or was it just 25 completely random placements? Was there a central theme of travel behind them?

Emma: I think quite a few of them, they were based around writing, which was a skill that I wanted to explore further. Again, there was a few, as well, that were based abroad or that involved travel. But, generally no, they were quite diverse, I would say. They were generally just things that I’d wondered about over the — since you’re asked as a small child what you want to be when you grow up, since you answered that age 6 all the way up to age 24 and everything that I’d had kind of just lurking in the back of my head, and some of them were serious ideas and some of them were less so.

But, it was a chance to really go and actually answer those questions for myself. I’m trying to think. So, it literally is varied as property development to alpaca farming, to investigative journalism – there’s was The Telegraph for that one – to working at the British Council on Crisis Management, landscape gardening, interior design, being an extra in a movie.

So, really, really varied, and I ended up, after the first couple of placements, coming up with a set of criteria or careers attributes, I guess, because I realized that I needed a way to sort of objectively assess how much I liked a career. It sounds silly, but I think it’s very easy to be influenced by the people that you’re working with, and if you get on really, really well, I think it makes you like a job perhaps more than the work does.

Or, alternatively, you can get the other way around where you hate the people that you’re working with and it makes you think, “Oh, I don’t like this career,” but actually it’s just the people you’re working with rather than the work. You need to find a way to kind of see through some of that, particularly if you’re only doing something for a couple of weeks. You need to be quite not astute, but try and be as objective as you can during that time because you don’t have long enough to make a full judgment. You’re going off other people’s views.

James: And what criteria did you use, then, to try and be a bit subjective?

Emma: So, it’s three categories, I guess. The first one is skills-based. So, skills that both I wanted to use and I was also good at, and they’re not always the same thing. So, for me, that was things like using writing, it was things like thinking about things strategically. So, looking at the bigger picture, and I’ve kind of learned that I’m not good at the small details, but I am good at the big picture. So, kind of playing to that strength and that interest as well. Things like problem-solving — but, it could be anything. It could be teamwork, or leadership, or analyzing data, whatever it is.

So, it’s kind of that side, and then next was what I wanted out of a career. I think, all too often, we try and see how we fit into something else and into a job description, for example. We don’t think about how well it suits us as the person that we are, and I realize that the jobs that I’ve been doing, I was actually not very well suited to do at all. So, for me, it was things like wanting to make a difference, wanting to make a positive impact on society. It was things like variety.

I wanted to be doing something where it was a little bit unpredictable, I might not know what I was going to be doing or where I was going to be working in a month or two months’ time. Obviously, day in day out, there’s only so much you can do, but on the whole, I wanted something that was more varied than I’ve been doing before.

And then I wanted to do something where I felt like I was making an impact where me personally being in that specific job was having some form of positive impact on the role rather than the sort of job where I’ve been in before where I felt like I could just be replaced by a new one and I just didn’t mattered. Basically, I wanted to feel valued, I think, is what it came down to.

And then the third category was working environment, and I think this is something that’s very often overlooked, but is actually hugely important, and that’s actually where you want to be and the sorts of people you want to be with. So, for young grads, they might want to be with other young grads, work with other young people as an example.

But, it could be anything like, “Actually, do you want to be office-based or do you want to be doing something practical with your hands or outdoors?” and outdoors is a theme of quite a few of the jobs that I did. It could be things like, “Do you want to work for an international company that will send you all over the world or do you want to work for a two-man staff from your garden shed?” and really thinking of those things as well and trying to take those into account much more.

So, for me, it was things like, again, working outdoors or some non-desk-based work was, I think, how they phrased it, and travel as well was really important to me. So, then I really cross-ticked, question marked for all of those for each job to try and figure out a little bit more about how each job fitted into who I was overall as a person or what I wanted from work.

James: Brilliant. And were there any other placements that just you didn’t enjoy or just really weren’t for you at all?

Emma: Yeah, yeah, there was a couple. I think working in TV production was not for me. I think it was because the way that it was when I was there, it was quite hierarchical. You had to be seen to do your time at each sort of level and work your way up. Something I’ve realized is that I enjoy working somewhere with a very flat structure where it doesn’t matter where you are in the pecking order, if you’ve got a good idea, you’ve got a good idea, and just a bit more meritocracy and stuff like that.

That wasn’t for me, and that’s the way the industry works, and I totally understand why because it’s effectively project management on a massive scale, and it does how it needs to work, but it just wasn’t right for me, and that’s okay.

James: Any others apart from TV production?

Emma: There was a couple of others where I didn’t get on with the people so much. They weren’t, perhaps, as welcoming, and again, that was really difficult to try and not judge, obviously, an entire career based on a negative experience with a few temporary colleagues. So, that’s kind of why I came up with the criteria was to try and say, “Okay, no I need to be really objective about this and not judge this whole industry based off this two-week experience with some people that I didn’t get on with,” because obviously, that’s not representative.

So, what I started to do was, when I was in the placement, to interview, basically, as many people as I could that were working there full-time because, again, there’s only so much you can learn in two weeks, so I needed to go to the experts, people who were actually doing it and kind of ask their opinions and get a diverse range of views from them to try and understand that a bit better and recognize that, obviously, I cannot be an expert or fully understand a career in the space of two weeks, and I’m very happy to acknowledge that.

James: And which was your favorite placement? Which one blew your mind?

Emma: There’s quite a few that did. There’s quite a few that, I guess, challenged my expectations and my assumptions. So, alpaca farming was, I think, one of those, and it — so, I spent the whole morning doing everything that I would have expected to, so kind of animal husbandry, and feeding animals and all that sort of stuff.

Then, the afternoons were not what I’d expected at all, and I was working with a farmer who was also an entrepreneur. Because, to be a farmer and make a sustainable income in 2018, you don’t just farm. You need to sell your products as well, and so with her alpacas, for example, and I loved that it was a woman farmer, she got her alpacas, she sheared them, she sent the wool off to be spun into yarn. The yarn was then made into high-end luxury children’s clothes and sold to very expensive shops around the world.

And she managed every single step in that process, everything from literally helping an alpaca to give birth to negotiating with Selfridges or Harrods or whoever it was to building websites and trying to promote things on social media to finding a factory that will make the clothes to a high enough standard. And everything in that process, she needed to be resourceful for and run. And that was just one line of business that came out of that.

And if you just think about the sheer number of skills that you need to do that, it’s remarkable. It’s absolutely remarkable, and I guess I didn’t realize how purely entrepreneurial you had to be to be a farmer, and I found it really inspirational, and it was a really fantastic way of combining outdoor practical work with really intellectually-based entrepreneurship. And again, it just broke down all the assumptions and stereotypes that I had and really blew my mind in that respect.

Then, another one – and again, this was more circumstance than anything else – was travel-writing. I wrote an article about a country that I’ve been to with this travel company beforehand that I kind of was just playing around and seeing if I could write something. I sent it to the company and said, “By the way, I wrote this about you and I’ve named you,” and they emailed me back and said, “Would you like to go to Venezuela for a month and write about that?”

James: Wow.

Emma: Yeah, I was a little bit taken aback, to be honest, and said yes, and figured out the details later. And a few months later, I got on a plane and went to Venezuela for a month. And two days after I landed, it sort of broke out into semi civil war, sort of. Like not full civil war. I don’t know how much you know about Venezuela and politics at the moment, but it’s not great, and everything escalated, I guess, while I was there.

So, the travel-writing experience got quite dramatic. Got kind of barricaded into the city for four days, and fire bombs going off, and guns. It was quite dramatic. We had to have a military escort out the country and generally being able to interview Venezuelans to ask different perspectives about what was going on. It effectively turned into journalism as opposed to just travel-writing for tourism. It was a fascinating and unique experience that it wasn’t quite what I bargained for, but obviously was really, really interesting.

James: Amazing. So, 25 placements, two weeks a pop, how did you manage to survive? I’m guessing lots of them weren’t getting paid.

Emma: So, I’d saved up quite a lot beforehand. I not necessarily knew what I was going to be doing, but I realized while I was working that I just had a sense that this might be quite a good idea. But, generally I’m a saver anyway. I’m not a massive spender, so I’ve always saved and always worked at university, had jobs when I was 14 and babysitting down the road.

So, I did have a little pot of savings to draw on, and kind of waved goodbye to a potential house deposit. I worked throughout the year as well. I worked as a freelancer for quite a few of the companies that I did placements with, and that definitely made quite a difference financially. And then obviously, all the placements paid for my expenses, and some just paid an actual salary.

So, I kind of worked out and I ended up being cost-neutral. I didn’t make anything, but I didn’t lose anything. I just had enough to cover my expenses for the year and living as a frugal student, the frugalest of students, but without obviously being an actual student. So, I kind of just took that approach. So, I didn’t buy any clothes for an entire year. I didn’t go out and eat, I didn’t go to a pub. I just invited lots of people over to my house, to my flat, and made sure that I was going over to friends’ places rather than going out and just really lived a very, very student-friendly lifestyle for a year.

None of my friends are students anymore, but sort of taking that sort of approach, and I was lucky that I did have some savings. That obviously did help, and I was able to kind of earn little bits and pieces throughout the rest of the year as well.

James: So, you’ve got all these brilliant work placements. What advice would you give to people who are applying for work placements? Because, I know it’s something that people often find a bit daunting, and also it’s difficult to — you’ve obviously got a great response rate from the ones you applied to. What advice would you give to people who are looking for work placements?

Emma: I think that I took three different approaches with mixed success rates, but I’ve got placements through all of these. So, the first one, I used social media quite a lot. The alpaca farming, for example, I got through Twitter. I sent out a tweet, I did some research on hashtags on the right hashtags to be using. I sent out a tweet, and within 10 minutes, somebody offered me a placement.

James: What was the hashtag for that?

Emma: I’d have to look it up, to be honest. I don’t quite remember it. It was quite a few years ago now. But, basically what I found was that most industries have really, really specific hashtags for jobs within that industry. So, if you kind of do a little bit of research, send out a few tweets with the relevant hashtags, you tend to get picked up. So, that’s one way that I did it.

There’s also the equivalent on Facebook, which there’s quite a lot of professional networking groups and pages on Facebook in a different way to LinkedIn. So, I found, again, relevant ones for a couple different industries, and those were mostly media-based if you’re working for placements in that, and just put out requests on Facebook groups, and again, had quite a lucky pickup to that. I did that for TV, as well, I think, a TV production.

For Facebook groups, it worked better for sorts of jobs that tended to be contract-based or freelancer, anyway, which is generally true for the media and TV production as well as kind of short-term jobs, and you tend to hop around. It’s quite common within the industry. It’s not that I do that at the time. So, did that, and then I did a lot of cold-calling, which is kind of the more usual approach, so a lot of just emailing companies straight up with a cover letter and a CV and seeing what happened.

I tended to find I got a much, much better response rate by targeting small companies, and the smaller, the better, kind of under 10 people, if possible simply because they can make decisions so much faster. Within 20 minutes, your email could be sitting in front of a CEO because they’re all sitting around the same table anyway, and they could make a decision, and then you can start on Monday.

There’s just less, I guess, bureaucracy or red tape that needs to get involved compared to a larger organization where, obviously, there’s lots of checks and balances that need to be gone through, and HR departments. So, it’s just that bit harder, I think, with larger organizations, whereas smaller ones are just that bit more dynamic due to their size, I guess.

I found it varied quite a lot by industry to how many requests I have to send out. So, with property development, they said yes in the first hour of the first email I sent out, and I was really lucky, which is great. And then others, I’d send 40 different emails just to get one placement. So, it does vary by the competitiveness of the industry even though I did find. I don’t know, going to so many, every single one would kind of turn around and say, “This is the most competitive industry that you’ll find,” but nearly 25 of them all said that. Therefore, I kind of assumed ‘you’re all competitive, therefore none of you are competitive, therefore I’ll be fine’.

James: Everyone always likes to think they’re special.

Emma: Yeah, yeah, and I think some probably were more competitive than others, but I think you’re going for a job in a competitive world. Don’t let that put you off when people say that, basically, and that’s definitely something that did use to put me off as kind of the younger person. They said, “Oh, it’s too competitive,” and I’d freak out and say, “I can’t do that,” but that’s not true.

James: You mentioned “luck” quite a few times throughout the interview, and that you were lucky to get placements. But, one of the things that strikes me is that luck hasn’t played a part in it at all really. You’ve gone out, you’ve been bold, you’ve obviously put a lot of time and thought into each application, you’ve tailored them, you’ve focused them on specific people, and then you’ve put the work in, and you’ve applied, and sometimes it was the first people that got them that got back to you, and other times, it was the 41st person.

That’s not luck; that’s just hard work and putting the effort in. And definitely, listeners, one of the key takeaways for me from this episode is if you put the work in and you put the effort in, then when you get the reward, it’s not down to luck.

Emma: I guess so. I think maybe you’re mostly right. I think some of them, like with archaeology, for example, having somebody turn around and say, “Oh actually, yes, could you come to Transylvania immediately?” I think that was a lot of hard work that definitely went into it without a doubt.

James: But, there was opportunities there. You just got to reach out and ask for them. If you don’t ask, then you never know.

Emma: Exactly, and I think thinking outside the box as much as possible is also a good way to do it. The third way that I was going to kind of talk about was networking and trying to just find as many people as possible and shout about what you want to do to as many people as possible to get the message out there, whether that’s going to networking events, going to talks and lectures, or literally just asking your hairdresser, anybody.

Because, one thing I found is that you never know who knows someone, and that people like to talk about other people and use that as your advantage in the nicest way possible. I think it’s really important to talk to as many different people as you can because, again, something I found is that you never know where you’re going to end up when you start going down a path. You really don’t.

So, you might make that one connection with someone and you might not think anything of it, but that grows and that develops over a year or two, and then you end up starting a business, whatever it is, that you really don’t know where that’s going to end up when you start. So, it’s really worth investing in other people and investing your time in other relationships.

James: Completely agree. So, you’ve done 25 work placements. What advice would you give people who are going to undertake work placements just so that they can make the most of them? How can they really hit the ground running and make an impact?

Emma: I think it depends whether you’re talking about work experience or internships, but I’ll touch on internship, mostly, first. I think — sorry, on work experience mostly first. I think work experience placements tend to be quite short, so a week or two. I think, ultimately, to make the best use of it, it’s almost not so much about the work. It’s about the rest of the people that you’re working with and going for a coffee, one-on-one, with as many different people as you can in that team over the space of your placement, and asking them about their views.

Because, you’ve got to realize that you’re going in for a very short period of time. You’re not going to get an objective view of an entire career if you sit at your desk and just do the few tasks that you’re set for two weeks, but you are in a room full of 10, 20, however many experts in that career industry, because that’s what they do all day every day, and you’ve got a unique opportunity to ask the experts, effectively, about what they think.

And I think it’s really important to ask about the best days and all the good things, but also ask about the bad stuff. You want to know what a bad day looks like and what that’s like because you don’t want to realize after you’ve pursued that that actually, you’re expected to work weekends and evenings, and that’s not something you’re prepared to do, for example. Or, maybe it is, but I think it’s something that you need to know up front. You need to know the good and the bad at the same time, and that’s really, really important.

James: That’s great advice. Just put the effort in, get the placement, and then just make sure you don’t slack off then, but you carry on, work hard.

Emma: Oh yeah, of course.

James: And speaking to people.

Emma: Yeah, I think be really proactive with work. Not to say that the work’s more important. Obviously, it is, but don’t — I’ve also been in the workplace and had people come in for work experience and work for me, and all too often, you kind of see people sit there and not speak to anybody else for two weeks. They do the job, and they do the job well, and that’s great.

But, I think it’s about communicating with others and about really trying to understand it so that you get something out of it much more so. But, yeah obviously do the work you’re given to the best of your ability and to be really proactive in terms of getting work as well, not thinking, “Okay, I’ve done everything I’ve been set. What else?” Really going out and speaking, going and saying, “How can I help you? How can I do more of what you do? What can I do?” and speaking up, basically.

James: So, time, Emma, unfortunately, is running away with us. So, one final question before we move onto the quick-fire questions this week. You’ve been on the Fast Stream, you’ve had these 25 careers. What does the future hold for you now with your book coming out?

Emma: So, I said the book is coming out on the 3rd of January. So, I guess it kind of depends how well the book does, if it does well. I very much think there’ll be a book 2, and I’m kind of in discussion at the moment with publishers about a second book.

And if not, then I’m looking to start it up with a business and have a business plan and a potential partner to help other young people when they’re in a bit of a career crisis about what do you do about it and to kind of set up a series of placements for other young people, work experience placements to go away and try them for themselves. So, basically, turning their 25 before 25 project into a startup.

James: Ah, excellent. And listeners, you’ll be able to find links to everything that we’ve discussed today, including a full transcript over at the website at GraduateJobPodcast.com/25\. So, Emma time for the final few quick-fire questions now. So, I’d be interested in your responses here. You mentioned about your book coming out, but what one book would you recommend listeners that they should read to help them on their job search?

Emma: I thought “What Color is Your Parachute?” is a really good, practical way to guide you through career decisions. I think they republish a new edition every year, and it’s very up-to-date in terms of social media, and tech, and stuff like that. And it is also a really, really good practical book kind of guiding you through how to make career decisions and thinking about who you are as a person. So, I definitely point readers in that direction.

James: Excellent. And were you devouring lots of career-related books when you were having your existential crisis during the Fast Stream?

Emma: Absolutely, and there was one in particular was how to find fulfilling work by an author with the school of life, and that was really, really impactful for me because, obviously, one of the main things that I wanted to do in my career was to find work that felt like I was making a difference. So, that was a great book for kind of figuring it out what it is that — effectively, what it says in the title, “How To Find Fulfilling Work”. It really did answer that question very well.

James: Brilliant, and links to both of those books will be over in the show notes. As I mentioned, GraduateJobPodcast.com/25\. And Emma, what one internet resource would you point people towards?

Emma: Oh, there’s loads. I think I’ve used GradTouch quite a lot, which is a graduate job website, but their career advice stuff and articles are really, really, really good, and really useful. I really enjoyed that.

James: Ah, excellent. That’s not one I’ve come across, so I will check them out myself. And finally, Emma, what one job search tip can people implement today to help them find a job?

Emma: I would say I use LinkedIn a huge amount more than, I think, quite a lot of people do. So, I think it’s job search is obviously, in many cases, you want a job as quickly as possible, but I think there’s a lot to be said for investing in relationships, and going back to a point I’ve made about networking, what I did was upgraded my LinkedIn to a premium account, which you can do for free for a month, and I then kind of stopped it after a month before it started charging me.

And that means that you can contact anybody directly on LinkedIn. So, I had literally a list of people’s names that I wanted to contact, I kind of done some research and looked through their LinkedIn profiles and thought, “I really like your career, I like what you do, where you are,” and I sent them all — honestly, 100 people messages to say, “Can I take you out for coffee and learn more about what you do?”

I got an X number of people that came back and said yes and X number of people who completely ignored me. But, that’s normal. And the ones that said yes, we then went out for coffee and learned about what they did for a career, and that’s when you then start to say, “Oh maybe I could come along for a bit of work experience for a couple of weeks.

As you start to build up a relationship with people, you start to get to know them a little bit better, and then you can start to ask those questions, and I found that to be a really, really successful method that nobody had really told me before and I’d not heard about before in terms of searching for a job. It can take a little bit longer, but I think it’s much better in terms of targeting careers or jobs that you wouldn’t have otherwise come across or been exposed to.

These aren’t jobs that are advertised, necessarily, on company’s websites. This is part of the hidden jobs market, which ends up being, I think it’s about 60 to 80 percent of jobs aren’t advertised, and it’s kind of that backdoor approach.

James: That’s a brilliant tip, and listeners, one you should definitely, definitely put to practice. That’s great advice. Emma, thank you so much for appearing on the Graduate Job Podcast. What’s the best way that people can keep in touch with you and the work that you do?

Emma: So, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram, which is @25before25, or subscribe to my website, which is www.25before25.co.uk.

James: Emma, thank you so much for appearing on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Emma: Thank you so much for having me.

James: Boom. Listeners, there you go the brilliant Emma Rosen. What a story ey and much that I admire in it. Having the persistence to get the graduate job of her dreams after being turned down several times.  To then have the guts to realise that actually it wasn’t what she really wanted to do and that it wasn’t making her happy and to walk away from it. That must have been such a difficult decision to make and I know personally how I have hung around in jobs longer than I should have done. Then to back herself with going for 25 careers before the age of 25 and having the determination to make it happen, absolutely brilliant. If she can do it why can’t you, if you put the effort and dedication in then you can make it happen too. These placements didn’t all just fall onto her lap, as she said, some of them took 49 rejections before the 50th one said yes. That’s dedication for you. So my respect to Emma. So that brings us to the end of episode 79 and the final episode for 2018. 11 episodes out in 2018. I really must do better in 2019 and I will, don’t you worry. If you have been enjoying and getting value from the show you can thank me by leaving a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to the show. It will be massively appreciated, and will be a little Christmas present to me. One which was left recently is from Ashok over in the US who said, ‘I love the show, thanks for helping me to get ready for the graduate job interviews I have coming up’. Thanks Ashok. So please leave me a review and I will read it out next week. So that is everything for 2018. Have a lovely Christmas and a very happy new year and I will be back on the 2nd of January with an episode about the brilliant Change 100 internship scheme from the Leonard Cheshire trust. It will be a lovely one to start the new year off with. I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly I hope you use it, and apply it. See you next week