Dominique Aspey, Ecosystem Manager

Deciding on a future career path requires open-mindedness. This is certainly true of my own experience. When I was at school, I wanted to be a newspaper journalist but at the time (without giving my age away, it was quite a long time ago…) the option to train was at a journalism school in a dull town that I didn’t want to move to. I parked that idea and opened my mind to other options. If I told you that my first full-time job was working as a trainee estimator in the drawing office of an engineering company, you get an idea of how open minded I had started to be. Realising that I wasn’t doing a very good job of calculating ventilation ducts and air conditioning systems, I moved on and joined a global multi-national that makes many of the products that we all use every day to wash our clothes and clean our homes. I started in the comms office, sending messages to our global divisions and running around the buildings, factory and labs, delivering replies on bits of paper to the teams in super fast time. It was thrilling and I was good at it. So good in fact that I was quickly promoted to the Export Department and spent a couple of years there organising shipments of raw materials to our manufacturing divisions and customers around the world.

Buoyed by the knowledge I was gaining and my keen interest in a role with a global reach, I applied for an ambitious new job as an Export Buyer with a trading company in Liverpool. The company was over 100 years old with divisions across Africa and they had never had a woman working in the Buying department. My experience at the multi-national was too good for them to ignore though so they invited me to join as a trainee and I worked my way up to management level. I travelled to East Africa and across Europe and had customers in Russia. My most memorable buying experience was when I had to source runway landing lights for Entebbe Airport in Uganda. These had to be on a flight to Entebbe within a few hours or all night flights would have been grounded. It was incredibly exciting and varied and I loved it.

In 1999, everything was turned upside down when my dad died after a short illness. He had worked for the same company for many years and whilst content and well looked after, he hadn’t experienced much change or tried anything new. I didn’t want that to be me. It’s times of adversity, major upheaval or loss that can make you think “is this it?” and I knew I needed to open my mind to something new again. I wouldn’t advocate jumping head first into something that you haven’t done your homework on and planned your options but I would say that you need to look at the level of income you need in order to sustain your desired lifestyle, what interests you and what aligns with your passions and values. For me, it was revisiting my early ambitions to do something that involved writing and communications so I went on to achieve a Masters in Marketing and a professional diploma in Digital Marketing. I also volunteer with a men’s mental health organisation and this brings me purpose and passion every week when I’m there.

It can be easy to get your heart set on a specific career but you can miss out on potential opportunities along the way. Things don’t always go according to plan but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. You may find that the specific job you’ve been working towards isn’t actually the one for you. I say this from experience! If I can give you one piece of advice from my career journey, it’s that it’s beneficial to be flexible in your mindset as well as your decision making. It is important to set goals and create timelines for achieving these goals however, it is also important to remember that some things are outside of our control. If you can create contingency plans and be prepared for unforeseen events, you will be able to handle changes and setbacks more effectively. Hello Coronavirus Pandemic…

With this in mind, LJMU’s Careers, Employability and Enterprise team has partnered again with Google Digital Garage to bring another series of webinars to help our students, recent graduates, wider alumni community and staff. The first session in the new series is Find your Career Goals on Tuesday 6th October: this live, 1-hour webinar [and ongoing series] will give you additional skills, tools and motivation to keep pursuing your personal and professional goals and bigger life plan.

Book your ticket here for Tuesday 6th October, 3pm-4pm. It is quickly followed with how to build your personal brand online (7th October) and how to create engaging presentations for successful projects (8th October).

You may not always get to where you want to be as quick as you had expected but if you arm yourself with tools and techniques and keep that open mind, you are more likely to reach your full potential.