Career Change Case Study

Alexis Camble

My Career Journey

An interview with Alexis Camble.

Hi, Diana here. I don’t often talk about specific case studies or name people who have given me testimonials, as client confidentiality is absolutely key to what I do. However, Alexis kindly agreed to do an interview to talk through her career journey.

Alexis Camble - My Career Journey

I graduated in history from Newcastle University in 2005 and started my first job soon after, working in local government in Sheffield, on housing policy. I felt drawn to the charity sector, particularly the campaigning side, and when a job came up in Edinburgh as Shelter Scotland’s policy officer I applied, got it and moved to Scotland. More charity sector jobs followed: in London with a learning disabilities charity and then for Diabetes Scotland. I loved the work, but after nine years on short-term contracts, I couldn’t see a career path.

I explored my options. What about teaching? I was interested in education, had been a volunteer tutor for a long time, teaching English as a foreign language and tutoring young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. I took the plunge, qualified at Glasgow University and in 2015 began teaching history at a school in East Kilbride, outside Glasgow.             

Teaching was great. I really enjoyed the relationships with the kids and I loved helping them learn. I became deeply involved in school life, particularly in outdoor education, but after two years the sheer overload of teaching and admin work had built up and up, to the point where I was under constant stress with no work-life balance. I felt useless: no use as a family member and no use to my students. I realised that if I carried on I would either burn out completely or would have to cut corners in what I was doing, and that would affect young people’s learning. It was a huge decision, but I decided to leave teaching, and try to find something connected with education for which I could use my teaching qualification.      

What to do next?

Before leaving I found a job as a schools outreach officer with Changing Faces, a charity which supports people marked by scars. This led to a partnership project with University College London, developing resources for teachers and working with universities on teacher training. Again this was a fixed-term contract, and while I enjoyed the work I still felt the need for a career path. Having worked or studied for 12 years since leaving university I felt really stuck.

          I’m very close to my sister-in-law, who works in HR, and I talked things over with her. She explained that when people are leaving organisations their employers sometimes arrange some career coaching to help them decide how best to move on. This was a new idea to me, so I did some investigation and found Diana. Diana explained that she offered a structured programme with sessions stretching over a period of months, looking at what’s important to you at work, what you are really looking for from a job, what sort of work-life balance you need, and also how personal attributes match up with actual jobs that are out there. I signed up.

Career Coaching with Diana

Working with Diana was great. Diana is supportive and knowledgeable, with a keen ability to ask the right questions and bring you to a point where you see more clearly what you want, even though you haven’t articulated this yet. From a confidence point of view, thinking about what skills I have and the skills I haven’t used for a while was really valuable. I think you can easily fall into a rut, thinking ‘this is what I’m good at’ and just sticking to it. That might be what you’re good at in your current job, but you may also have other skills which the current job doesn’t call for. Talking about work-life balance was also very helpful. I am happy to work hard, but I don’t want to be working a sixty-hour week, every week.

I am very interested in the strategic side of organisations, and in diversity inclusion. So when we looked at the kinds of jobs I was suited for, HR came out really strongly. I did some research and spoke to the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, the professional body for HR (there’s a branch in Edinburgh, which I’m now on the committee of). I spoke to HR course leaders at Napier and Edinburgh universities and decided I would go back to full-time education, and do an MSc in Human Resource Management. A professional qualification combined with my 15 years of working experience would give me a good prospect for employment. Right now I’m putting the finishing touches to my dissertation.

 A new chapter

There’s no doubt that making a complete career change was a very difficult decision. There’s always that sense of failure, of not doing what you set out to do. But I know now that it was the right decision. I was lucky in that my faculty head and headteacher were so understanding about my leaving, and that my husband, who has now, like me, switched from teaching to working in data science, completely got what I was going through. He was having the same issues of having eight million things to do and not enough time to do them. It was so good that he understood, and was able to support us both while I was studying full-time.

I’m applying for jobs now. Through Napier University I’ve been paired with a mentor, who is absolutely brilliant. Like Diana, she has massive experience and she has been so helpful in looking at my job applications, picking out things that I need to emphasise or say more about and so on. Jobs in the field I’m particularly interested in, diversity and inclusion, are quite hard to come by, so if I have to go into something more generalist within HR, to begin with, I’m happy to do that. I’m 15 years into my career, I’ve got several different periods of success behind me that I can draw upon, and I believe that I can succeed in HR. Going through these processes makes you realise that actually, although it might not feel great at the time and might feel unsettling, it will eventually work out. I feel that I’ve done the right thing.

December 2020 UPDATE! Big Congratulations to Alexia who had a job at COSLA in Diversity and Inclusion. Very well deserved!

I am Diana Dawson, Founder of Working Career. As a Professional Career Coach, Career Psychologist, Career Counsellor, Career Consultant, Executive Coach and Wellbeing at Work Coach, I work with organisations and individuals to help manage their careers.

I am an Accredited Master Coach with the Association for Coaching, a Coaching Psychologist and Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist with nearly 20 years of experience in the field.

I work with professional people from different sectors and backgrounds to cope and flourish at work. I also run Career Workshops and Wellbeing Workshops for organisations.

I can provide one-to-one career coaching in Edinburgh or zoom sessions worldwide. I can provide Career Workshops at your organisation or remotely. Find out more about me here