Today was my last day working a 'proper job', as I'm off to focus on freelance work and personal projects for the foreseeable future. Thread below is a collection of thoughts on things we get wrong about 'work', and how I got to this point (1/13)

When we're at school/university, we're forced to think about work in a very role-specific way. We get asked "what do you want to be when you're older" where "to be" is interpreted as "what role do you want?" (2/13)

Part of the reason that most people have trouble answering these questions is that we don't naturally think in terms of roles. The role you end up in is a very downstream effect of lots of other choices. (3/13)

I think a more fundamental question, and one which you can start to think about more easily at a younger age, is "how do you want to work?"

Do you want to be an employee? Do you want to start something? Do you want something less defined (i.e. freelancing?) (4/13)

This distinction, in particular "do you want to be an employee or not?" seems far more important to get right than "what industry do you want to work in?", and yet it's a question that you're unlikely to consider at a young age (5/13)

Unfortunately, it's not a question to which you can easily change your answer. If you've chosen an industry like finance or consulting, and you then realise you don't want to be tied to an employer, you have far fewer options outside of completely retraining (6/13)

In this sense, I think it's important to educate students about the degree to which their choice of industry locks them in to being an employee. (7/13)

Even students who don't know exactly what they want to do may well have an intuition on whether they prefer the security of employment, or would prefer the flexibility of working non-permanently/founding something. (8/13)

If they have an intuition for this, and choose flexibility, they can start to plan their careers around this. They can prioritise learning skills for which there is an efficient marketplace (design, tech, writing, marketing) (9/13)

These skills stand in opposition to those that are usually sold through firms (consulting, finance, law). Don't get me wrong, you do get freelancers in all of those areas, but it's much harder to break into the freelance market and required far more experience (10/13)

I only got into marketing by accident (that's another thread) but I feel lucky I did; I feel lucky to have fallen into a profession where I don't have to be dependent on a single employer, and a 9-5 job. (11/13)

It took me a few years to realise I was lucky, and that it wasn't a mistake getting into marketing. If I had realised earlier on the benefits of being in a field where you're not tied to an employer, I think I would have felt happier about my career choice much earlier on (12/13)

Next time I'm talking to a student about careers, I definitely want to avoid asking them what sort of role they'd like to go into, and instead ask them more upstream questions about what kind of relationship with work they'd find most fulfilling (13/13)