A career driven by boredom

Early in my working life, I did a psychometric test which said that I would do best in a role that was intrinsically challenging and involved a large element of social interaction. And this proved to be accurate!

My first career was in the Insurance industry in the City. I moved steadily up the career ladder learning on the job and completing professional qualifications. I loved it - until I didn’t any longer…. The reason?  I was bored – I had done it for more than 10 years and it was too easy (busy, yes, but easy). At the time the obvious move would have been to a competitor, but they would have wanted me to do the same role I was already doing. Why do that?

I decided to do a Psychology degree with the Open University. That satisfied the need for intellectual stimulation and so I enjoyed my job again. Then family life intervened and I took the opportunity of redundancy to stay at home with my young children. Very busy, challenging, very rewarding, often fun. But….dare I say it…children are (intellectually) boring!!

So when my youngest went to school full time I started a Masters in research methods in psychology – which I loved. When I finished, and after a short break, I took a job as a teaching assistant at a sixth form college (much to my husband’s relief – “you are terrible when you have nothing to do”). However, that only lasted six months as it was not challenging enough. Once again I turned to education – this time starting a PhD.

Although I was ambitious, organised and a planner, until now none of these choices were consciously made with a career in mind. But I found I loved doing research. Might it be the right career for me? It was engaging and I was learning all the time. I also really enjoyed working as part of a team and engaging with patients for my studies.

Towards the end of the PhD, I worked on a study with a new patient group. This was the first trial involving a large multidisciplinary team. A great learning opportunity. This led to a role as a Clinical Studies Officer (CSO) in a mental health Trust.  I was working on several projects and meeting lots of people and initially I loved it.  But eventually, I wanted more… so I took on a Trial Manager post for a study looking at using a robot to help children with autism develop their social communication skills. This played to my organisational skills - I was involved from the very beginning, designing the study, applying for funding, setting it up and running it. Working across multi-disciplinary teams. I was still doing the CSO role so I had a lot of variety.

I turned down a trial manager role on a study I helped set up as it was a five year project and I thought I would get bored!!  Instead I took a trial manager role on a large scale multi-site study in foster care. This gave me the opportunity to work with a Chief Investigator I admired and thought I could learn from. The study was in a field I had little experience of and would involve co-ordinating activities across multiple partners which would play to my organisational and social skills.

In the end the study ran for nearly 5 years but I didn’t get bored as there were many challenges and so much to learn – partly due to the pandemic. Moving the intervention online, working at home, using MS Teams (then a new technology) to communicate and share files. Navigating setting up a study in children’s social care, which does not have a robust infrastructure to support research.

My role now is as the Manager of the Clinical Trials Unit here at the University of Hertfordshire. What do I love about it? Working with people? Tick! Variety? Tick! Learning new things? Tick! For now, this role perfectly offers what I need to be happy in my job. But I am aware that the time might come when boredom is again on the horizon. So I continue to seek opportunities to learn something new. Whether that be working on a study that presents challenges or whether it is something else entirely new, who knows?

I have been lucky in my career in that I was able to recognise very early on that I needed to be intellectually stimulated to be happy. Having access to education has, at times when I really need it, satisfied that need. But education has also allowed me to have choices about what I do next.  Retirement is now 3-6 years away – what on earth will I do with myself? Maybe another degree!!