Hi everybody and welcome to the squiggly career podcast from Amazing If. And if you are one of the 12,000 people that listen to our first series on confidence, welcome back. I'm Helen Tupper and I'm here with Sarah Ellis. Hi everybody. And we started Amazing If back in 2013 because we recognise that our own careers will be becoming much more

squiggly. And we know that squiggly is a bit of a funny term to use in the context of your career.

So maybe Sarah, if I ask you, what does having a squiggly career actually mean to you?

I think it's just that everything at work is becoming harder to predict and there's so much more

change than they used to be

not even just in your career generally but even like the last three jobs i've had didn't exist before

i had them so i used to have this perfectly prepared career plan where i you know could name the job

title that i was hoping to get in the future whereas now that just feels really unrealistic

so there's lots

more change. I think some of that happens to us and some of it we are in control of. And it just

feels like we're in a really different world of work now. So 10 years ago, I went to work in a big

corporate organisation. I'd got one job and that was it. That was my whole of my work life.

And now, you know, 15 years on, I've got three different jobs. I do them all part time. And everything

just feels really squiggly. It just feels like the right word to describe my career. And I think

the careers are the lots of people that we talk to. And I think sometimes lots of squigglyness, it doesn't always, but I do think you need a bit of confidence sometimes.

So to manage to feel like all that stuff is happening to you, some of which you're in control of, some of which you're not, and that you can navigate it happily, I think takes you to know what you're great at and know people who can help you and maybe have some idea of where you want to go, even if it's not the exact destination,

sort of the direction you want to go in. And so if you've got all that, squigglyness, I think,

can feel quite exciting because there's loads of opportunities and you're, you know,

you're juggling three part-time jobs, all that great stuff. But I think maybe if you've not

got that stuff, it can feel a bit scary, a bit daunting.

Sometimes you can feel maybe a bit lost in that squiggle.

And that's very much, I think, the insight that we started with in terms of this podcast.

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