One day or day one. You decide.
My ‘Journey Into FinTech’ story is quite an interesting one. I’d need about 10 articles to tell the full story but for now I’ll share snippets from time to time as I’m sure someone out there can be encouraged from sharing these experiences.
Because of the unconventional route my latter years took, I’m often asked why I made the dramatic change and how I made that change so effortlessly. I’m forever intrigued whenever I think about how I got to where I am today, in terms of career and the truth is… I woke up one day in April 2017 and decided to put a halt on everything. What I wanted was to truly experience what it means to live in the now. At the time, this was an extremely drastic measure to take considering I was bang in the middle of developing certain skills and working on different projects. I wanted to go with the flow for once in my life and trust that the current would take me wherever I needed to go.
I thought it’d be more engaging to share this story with you all by interviewing myself! Asking myself the same questions I once had before taking the leap. Firstly, this will help keep me on topic and secondly it gets you, the readers, straight into the life changing parts; the juicy bits.
The Questions & The Experiences
1. What is your current job role and what do you do?
I’m currently a Risk & Compliance Analyst. My job is to aid my employer in identifying, measuring and managing compliance risks effectively.
I achieve this by providing specific and detailed analysis to the rest of my team to be able to provide frameworks, policies and processes, which enables the business to comply with local legislations and relevant regulations.
2. What did you aspire to be, when growing up?
At a very young age, I became a School Councillor in my primary school. This was my first experience in speaking publicly and understanding the needs of others through effective listening and communication. I very quickly related these skills with a career in Law and had worked to become a Lawyer from that point onwards. I excelled in all the Humanitarian subjects such as History and Sociology and thoroughly enjoyed education as a whole.
3. What did you experience that led to your career change?
I went to a University in London and hated it. That sums it up.
Up to the age of 18, everything I had done was very logical and by the book. My life was simple math: 1 + 1 would equal 2. There weren’t many stumbling blocks that I experienced until I got to university because I was lacking in exposure to things like ‘change’ and ‘failure’. 18 is still a very young age and so a level of naivety is expected but I lived by the book because I didn’t necessarily have any other vision than the one I had created for myself which ultimately stemmed from movies like Legally Blonde. I didn’t personally know of any lawyers that I could speak with about what a career in law would actually look like. I didn’t speak to anyone who had studied the subjects that I did, to find out what my alternatives and options could’ve been. I was narrating my own fairytale through rose-tinted glasses to become a Lawyer by going to one of the best Law schools in London.
This was my first real failure and it crushed me.
For many different reasons I didn’t enjoy the experience of learning like I was previously used to. I found that I wasn’t excelling in certain topics in comparison to others which again, I wasn’t used to. These sudden changes were difficult to adapt to because I had never considered an alternative to a career in Law and had no clue of the other routes I could’ve taken which may have been more suitable for me. It was the fear of the unknown that had gripped me and I didn’t know how to move forward other than to complete my studies as best I could and keep fighting for my dream job somehow, all whilst I could feel the spark fading.
4. What made you take the leap of faith? How did you know you could do it?
Eventually I grew to understand that the girl I had become between 18-21 years old was no longer the girl that dreamed of being a lawyer between the ages of 7-17. The first step was acknowledging that. The second step was deciding where I go from that revelation.
I chose to tap into my creative side for a few years instead. I was gigging everywhere. I was competing and headlining several times a month. I was performing at festivals and creating awesome sounds in the studio. I put myself in the face of nerve racking situations to see if I could generate the spark I once had for a career in law.. but it never came and that’s when I decided, I’m stopping everything and from now on I’m going with the flow.
Everything from that point was out of my control and that’s where my story in FinTech began. Honestly, I didn’t understand I could do anything great in this space. I didn’t know why the only opportunities I was being presented with were all within the digital finance sector as it was the one area I had never studied but that reason alone kept me interested and so I just followed the journey that life was naturally taking me on.
5. What were the pro’s and con’s of a career change for you?
A pro I’ve found in changing careers is that everything is new. You intentionally have to choose to become a student again to master things. For someone that loved education as much as I did, it was like a love language for me. I was so engaged in learning more about this new and invigorating dimension of Finance that I’ve stayed on that course ever since. You create new relationships, you build upon different tolerances and most importantly, you experience a new capacity and breadth of yourself.
Funnily enough, I think the main con is also the main pro: everything is new. A career change potentially puts you back to ground zero. Despite this though, I do believe that no matter what you’ve studied and experienced, there is always a way to transfer your learnings and adapt them to the new thing you’re trying to accomplish. ‘New’ can be scary and can generate a level of fear like no other when it’s viewed as ‘the unknown’ and so what you’ll find at the core of a career change, is the necessary requirement of a change in your mindset to be able to see the great potential behind starting something afresh.
6. What advice would you give someone who is unsure of their current career?
Absolutely write your thoughts down and make it plain!
Understand why you feel the way you feel and figure out if your reasons are internal or external, for example you may not believe you have the right skills for your current job or it may be the case that you don’t work well with particular colleagues who do exactly what you do. The only person that can assess your level of conviction towards a thing is yourself and so that conviction can never be swayed by external forces. The decision to change careers must wholly be yours and if it is to say goodbye to everything you once knew, for greener pastures, be assured that you are not the first who plucked the courage to try something unknown and surpassed their own expectations.
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Liz. #FTWL
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