Inspirational Guest Speaker for International Women's Day
On International Women's Day our Year 12 students welcomed guest speaker, Jane Lucy, to their assembly. Jane has had a fascinating career path which started in criminal law, switched to film and media before working in the tech. start-up arena.
She explained to students that it's ok not to know what they want to do, but that they should secure the very best qualifications they can achieve, as it's a lot easier to transition down rather than up. It was for this reason that Jane studied for a Law degree in her home country of Australia rather than the Arts degree she was initially interested in, as she felt that the Law qualification had more gravitas when applying for jobs.
After qualifying Jane worked as a duty solicitor for legal aid, seeing people for 15-30 minutes prior to their appearance in court, and through these interaction she became very good at extracting information from people and knowing what details were important. Although Jane undoubtably made a difference, she began to feel that she was just 'processing' people through the system and looked around for a change. TV seemed the natural choice as her background in law was in demand by television companies wishing to create true-to-life dramas.
After moving to the UK Jane began writing for TV programmes linked to crime, before moving into other genres and winning a prestigious award from the Royal Television Society.
Around this time TV was changing, as the advent of the Internet altered the way that consumers accessed media channels. Work with Channel 4 to engage viewers on cross-channel platforms opened a new door for Jane and she became intrigued by 'big data' and how it is used by comparison websites.
Her next career move was as a tech start-up entrepreneur and despite being unable to code, Jane managed to secure £5m of funding for her businesses which she built to a point which was ready to scale.
Jane finished her inspirational talk by reassuring students that the landscape is changing at such speed that it's natural to be unsure of their future career path at this stage of their lives. Digital disruption is taking place all the time and there will be even more changes by the time the students have finished their education and are entering the world of work.
Deputy Headteacher with responsibility for Personal Development, Mrs Henly, thanked Jane for sharing her incredible journey since leaving full time education with our students. She reminded them that it's OK to be unsure of their career path at this stage, but that National Careers Week is the ideal opportunity to delve into platforms like Unifrog; here they can discover the qualifications needed for certain sectors that interest them, find out about the salaries for roles within these industries and the qualifications needed to access the job market. Above all, she wanted the students to be curious.
Our thanks to Jane for creating an informative and engaging presentation and for joining us to show how women with vision can achieve great success across a range of industries on International Women's Day.
