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Jimmy's Jobs of the Future

Ruth Handcock - Octopus Investments: What skills CEOs hire for and how to be an accessible leader

Jimmy's Jobs of the Future

Boxlight Creative Studio

Careers, Business, Technology

5.01K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today's guest is Ruth Handcock, CEO of Octopus Investments. Ruth has had a really interesting career. She's gone from working on checkouts and factories during the nightshift to being the CEO of one of the UK's biggest financial service firms. It's an incredible journey and one we're excited to share with you.Investing can often seem an opaque world but Ruth talks us through what Octopus Investments does and dismantles the long-held beliefs about what you need to start investing.  Ruth is also the Chair of Octopus MoneyCoach.  The British tendency not to talk about money means we are often shy when it's going well but are especially tight-lipped when things go wrong. In this episode, we delve more into the role MoneyCoach plays in reducing people's money worries and why it's so crucial for employers to offer this type of service. In this episode with Ruth we discuss: Her experience as Global finance director of Bacardi , specifically martini whiskey and cognac. Ruth's wide variety of jobs including checkout operative, salad chopper on a nightshift and car washer- what did those jobs teach her about being CEO of an investment firm?  What do CEOs look for when hiring? Learnings from her own entrepreneurial failure  What attracted her to join Octopus? What does Octopus Investments do?  How much money do you need to invest?  The difference between Octopus Ventures and Investments. What is the role of a Chief Executive?  How the pandemic was an opportunity to do that better. Setting boundaries in the world of work. What more can we do to inspire women at the top of financial services?  What the government can do to help this? How easy has she found it to achieve work-life balance?  How did she find what she was passionate about?  What is Octopus Moneycoach and what does it do? Where are there opportunities to improve education post-pandemic?  If Ruth was 22 in 2022, what sectors would she like to work in?  What sources of information does she consume?  What her cocktail of choice is?  Subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes, releasing every Wednesday.You can sign up to Jimmy's Substack here for weekly content on the future of work, technology, and politicsFor more information on partnering with us please visit our partnerships page here.Also make sure you subscribe to The Shift, you can find it here on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

We don't see enough women in senior roles, but that creates a perception that women can't

0:11.2

get senior roles.

0:12.2

It's absolutely not true, but there is a point at which you have to have kind of a critical

0:17.4

mass that make people believe that it's possible.

0:21.0

So shouting about it, being encouraging women, helping women, men helping women, mentoring,

0:28.1

all those things have a massive place, being open that juggling a career with kids is

0:32.4

really hard.

0:33.4

You're not supposed to find it easy.

0:34.4

Yeah.

0:35.4

It's really, really hard.

0:36.4

And if you're finding it hard, that's not a failing of you.

0:38.9

That's because it's really hard.

0:45.2

Welcome to this episode of Jimmy's Jobs.

0:48.4

I wanted to start today by paying tribute to Jamal Edwards, who passed away over the

0:53.2

weekend at the age of 31.

0:55.8

Jamal founded SBTV with a camcorder in 2006, and went on to become one of the pioneers

1:03.7

in the new wave of British entrepreneurialism that we are seeing now.

1:07.5

He was, in effect, the first YouTube creator, inspiring the careers of Jesse J and Ed Sheeran.

1:15.2

The first time I saw Jamal speak was in 2014 in Sheffield.

1:19.2

He was spellbinding with his vision for the way that everyone could become a creator,

1:24.0

and that everyone had access to these new platforms where they could put themselves

1:28.7

out there and no longer necessarily have to have a foot in the door with big corporations

...

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