As we enter the ‘milkround’ recruitment cycle for university graduates, I’ve been reflecting on my own career path to date. Especially those first few years of my career and how the choices I made back then brought me to where I am now, as a Project Leader at Coppett Hill, in ways I never would have predicted or could have planned for. I thought it might be helpful for those of you thinking about your next job to share my experience and some reflections. As always, there’s been a healthy mix of proactive decisions and hard work along with a good dose of luck (and the mindset to make the most of it)!
My current role is as a Project Leader for Coppett Hill. I was the first official employee, joining Dave when he started the business in 2023. My work set up is quite unusual; although the rest of the team are based in London, I am based in Vancouver, Canada, and work remotely except for a couple of trips to the UK each year (most importantly, to play croquet with the new Associates at the offsite!). I also work part-time, working 3.5 days a week across Monday- Thursday. My career started in a fairly typical way with internships and graduate programmes, but I’m really grateful that through the years that I’ve been able to learn about what I enjoy and what motivates me and start to shape a career around that.
Pre University
My first bit of career luck was getting a 6-month internship as a Research Assistant at Deutsche Bank during my gap year, from a tiny advert a friend found in the back of ‘Economics Today’ magazine. I’m not that old (!) so most jobs were advertised online and I’m still not sure why they chose to advertise this role solely in print. It meant the competition wasn’t too stiff and I got the one open position. I turned out to be the only junior in a fairly senior research team, so I had great exposure to senior colleagues. Commuting in the dark on the 7am train to London Bridge whilst my friends were enjoying their fresher terms definitely gave me additional appreciation of student life when my time came around.
I’d always had part time jobs since I was old enough to hold a sign post advertising my dad’s French markets (my first marketing role!). From selling cheese and saucisson, to working at Pizza Hut, all those early jobs taught me a lot and there’s a huge amount of value in getting some real work experience, it doesn’t need to be a structured City internship.
Lesson learnt: There are great opportunities hidden outside the mainstream if you’re willing to look and keep an open mind.
University
I went on to do my undergrad in Economics and Management at New College, Oxford. I’d chosen economics because I’d found it interesting at school, and enjoyed math-led subjects, and I liked the sound of the combination with management to get a more commercial lens. I’d also strongly considered engineering and before that medicine. In the end the most useful parts of my degree were the skills I learned and the people I was surrounded by, rather than the specific subject matter. I will happily admit that I don’t use any of the ‘Marketing’ module in my work at Coppett Hill! However, the ability to ingest large amounts of information quickly, take a structured approach to problem solving, use data to answer questions and present and debate complex topics, have all come in incredibly useful.
Lesson learnt: ‘Soft’ or general skills such as learning agility, problem solving, relationship building, are often more important than hard subject specific skills (which can be more easily taught) early in your career. One of the most useful skills I learnt was the ability to take on and assimilate large quantities of information quickly, which is invaluable when starting any new job.
In the summer of my first year, I focussed on more travelling and making money. Peers who wanted to go into banking were already applying for internships and work experience as that track started early. In all honesty, I didn’t know what I wanted to do and wanted to keep the options open so when I heard about consulting in my second year it sounded like a good choice. A second piece of luck! A friend in the year above had just gotten a job offer at BCG so she told me about the firm and I thought it sounded great. I’d also heard of Accenture through another friend. They happened to both have late application deadlines, so I applied for both of those internships and nothing else. I wouldn’t recommend this approach! But I also want to normalise that not everyone has a full picture of the career landscape early on. Career websites can be full of jargon and hard to translate into reality, try to talk to people about their actual experience of work to build up a picture of what appeals to you and what doesn’t. This might include students in different years, recent grads at firms you’re interested in and employees at recruitment fairs. Posts like ‘Day in the Life of an Associate’ by Jack, one of Coppett Hill’s associates, are also valuable for getting an idea of what the job looks like day to day.
Lesson learnt: Make the most of your ‘network’, this might just mean learning and expanding your horizons, not necessarily directly looking for jobs. As the ‘power of weak ties’ suggests, throughout my career a huge number of opportunities came through direct and indirect connections.
Post University
I really enjoyed my 8-week summer internship at BCG and so of course I accepted the job offer and was lucky not to be dealing with job applications in my final year. I worked with two fantastic Project Leaders in the Healthcare practice during my internship, who went on to be important mentors to me during my time at BCG. A big part of what drew me to BCG was the focus on development, backed up with a real culture of mentorship and training. As we build Coppett Hill this approach is really core to our culture, and I would advise anyone when job hunting to really think about who you’ll be working with as well as what you’ll be doing. Some practical examples of the ways mentors helped me in my time at BCG:
Helping me find my own style of presenting and building relationships that worked with my personality, rather than trying to force fit into a predominantly masculine culture
Advocated for me taking a 9 month secondment at TimeInc despite there being a freeze on secondments due to consulting capacity constraints
Lesson learnt: Invest in building relationships and make the most of support that others can offer. It’s not just mentors either, many of the group of 12 interns from that summer are also still close friends of mine and now hold very interesting roles around the world.
I didn’t originally plan to stay in consulting long term, but I wanted to stay long enough to do a secondment, which felt like a ‘free’ opportunity to try out another job. I worked for 9 months at the media company TimeInc, getting the chance to actually execute things on the ground. Whilst at BCG I also took chances to get involved in as much non-project work as I could, such as recruitment and event organisation. One of the appeals of consulting was the variety of the work and for me that was as much about different types of role as well as seeing different industries and teams. The consulting model meant I had the chance to work with a lot of different senior leaders and peers and learn from their different styles. Once again, the power of network has been invaluable and as well as gaining some friends for life, many of my former colleagues have also gone on to be clients, both in my independent work and at Coppett Hill!
I decided to leave consulting as I felt like I wanted to have more direct impact rather than being just in an advisory role. Aren’t I back in consulting now you ask? Yes, and only because Coppett Hill’s model is very different than typical strategy consulting, working closely with teams on the ground and much more focussed on impact rather than producing long slide decks.
Lesson learnt: Seize opportunities to build out your experience – not for the sake of your CV, but to do things that interest you and learn about what you enjoy.
I’m going to skim over the more recent parts of my career for the purpose of this post. I left BCG after 5 years to work at mid-market private equity firm Livingbridge. I heard of Livingbridge through a friend that worked there, and the role appealed because of the chance to work with smaller and fast-growing businesses where I felt I could have more impact due their size and dynamism. Working in the Value Creation team as well as taking Board seats also gave me the chance to work with businesses more holistically and over a longer time horizon versus project work. I talk more about what the work of ‘Value Creation’ actually involves in a previous post.
At the start of 2020 I left London, and Livingbridge, to move to British Columbia, Canada. This was multi-faceted, but a big reason was the pull of the mountains and the desire to try a slower and more nature-based life. I didn’t have a long-term plan for work when I moved, which as you might guess was a little uncomfortable for someone with my background! I thought I would freelance for 6 months or so and then find a job locally. As we know, the Covid pandemic put a spanner in even the best laid plans so it gave me space to experiment and test a few things. I co-founded a social enterprise offering virtual private concerts with professional musicians via Zoom. This was a fantastic opportunity and steep learning curve, having to do the on the ground execution of things like creating marketing emails, running Facebook ads and managing customer issues. My partner and I ran that pro-bono and I was also working remotely as an independent consultant. Having a consulting background set me up well for freelance work, and again my network was hugely valuable – every single project I worked on came to me through my network.
Coppett Hill
Dave and I worked together at Livingbridge and we started talking back in summer 2023 as he was thinking about scaling Coppett Hill. I was ready for a new challenge, missing working with a team and being part of something. A big part of the appeal for me was getting to build a company from the beginning, taking the best parts of the firms we’ve worked for but also being able to change the things that frustrated us. Core to this is recognising each person’s individual needs and creating a culture where ‘high potential can become high performance’. This might mean providing softer support to help someone build their confidence, creating ‘safe’ opportunities for people to test out new skills, or specific technical training and hands-on analytical experience. In reality, for most people it’s probably a mix of all!
I feel very lucky to be able to do this job remotely from Canada, and part time. That’s certainly not without its challenges, but in the last few years of testing different ways of living I’ve realised how much I value nature-connection and putting time into community and that the trade-offs are worth it for me. I think it’s a testament to the Coppett Hill culture that we’re able to accommodate this. It's also thanks to building the foundations in my early career, and the trust and relationships with current colleagues, that something like this is possible.
As I’ve been interviewing potential Associate candidates, I really enjoy discussing with them what they are looking for in a role and how they are thinking about their early career. In some ways, your early jobs are very important, setting you off on your initial career path and developing key skills. On the other hand, no one can really predict more than a few years ahead and your first job may have very little to do with what you’re doing in ten years’ time. If I were to have my time again, the two key themes I would focus on would be 1) opportunity for learning and growth, and 2) people and relationships. But that’s just me, I’ll leave you to reflect on what’s most important to you and how are you bringing that into your job search.
Lesson learnt: Keep exploring, learn what you value and what you enjoy, and don’t be afraid to go after it!