Giving Back - Being an Enterprise Advisor

I know I spooked a lot of you some time ago when I changed jobs. Everyone thought I wasn’t being a photographer any more when I listed myself as an Enterprise Advisor. If you look on my LinkedIn, I am still an Enterprise Advisor. 

But no, I wasn’t changing my career. I was just adding my support as a volunteer to the LEPS program of Enterprise Advisors, which gets businesses into schools to help them with their careers advice opportunities for the kids. Specifically for me it was Hexham Middle School, a school that I have connections with in my work web. 

My career path certainly wasn’t linear to most people, which I think is one of the reasons I got dragged into all of this. I’d argue there is a straight line but I think everybody else looking at it is a bit confused at how I got from my chemistry degree to being a photographer and all the things in between! But it’s been a fantastic working with Paul Freeman-Meyers at Hexham Middle School to support a plan of action to give the kids a sort of different experiences within work. 

I recently did an assembly to 150 Year 5s to just go on my journey a little bit and some of the places I’ve been and some of the companies I’ve shot with and they did recognise – yes they spotted the sports people a little bit quicker than some of the other logos apart from maybe Amazon and Aldi. But yeah they certainly spotted all of the footballers and the cricketers, they spotted Ollie Robinson really quickly too. 

Just to stand up in front of the kids and have a chat through my stuff, I was really impressed that they managed to get from what was my degree in relatively quickly with about five or six kids they had my degree nailed down. I don’t know if I look like a scientist or not but obviously the first couple of choices was photography and geography was mentioned as well and then somebody mentioned physics I mean it could have just been a guess but I was like that’s pretty close. 

It’s been it’s been a great program to be involved with and the support from Dennis and Yvonne was fantastic. I think I’m now being roped into something else in January that should be really exciting, bringing this to other to other schools and other individuals so we’ll see how that goes. As I say, if me waffling on helps people, we’re all good. I’d certainly say to any other businesses out there, it’s been a great thing for me just to be able to give something back and to tell my story a little bit and if you have the opportunity within your work to give back in this kind of way it’s certainly worth a look at. You can see the smiles on the kids faces when you’re doing the projects with them and if it inspires one of the two of them to look at a career a slightly different way from the linear, ‘You must do A levels, you must do a degree, you must do the job that follows on from your degree,’ because I don’t know what the percentage is these days of how many people are actually working in the specifics of their degree. It’d be interesting for my head to be able to pull that up. I think I was slightly different in that sense of my chemistry degree a lot of people are still in chemistry whether that’s teaching science in various schools or specifically for companies like Johnson Matthey and Pfizer and that sort of thing there’s a lot of people doing chemistry still so absolute kudos to them for doing that. 

But obviously my path was a little different to end up with a camera in my hand and I don’t regret any of it in that sense because the skills I gained doing my degree really helped me. They’re now stood in front of a lecture theatre talking the specifics of the decolourisation methods of lignosulfonate, for example, my master’s project with Beauregard in Norway. It’s being able to stand up in front of people like that and do a topic that you don’t necessarily know inside out even though you should do after a year has meant that I can stand up in front of other kids and get them to talk about photography which was a significantly easier talk to do. So a shout out if you’re in the North East – have a chat with Dennis, they’re still looking for more advisors to help more schools so give them a shout.