Growing Ambitions

I've just joined an enterprise called Growing Ambitions. To quote from their website, "This unique UK-wide volunteering initiative puts real people, doing real jobs, in front of young people as career Speakers to tell them what their careers are really like and give them great ideas for their future. They need more real careers information. Growing Ambitions gives impact to volunteering in education and is an award-winning, not-for-profit organisation."

Which seems like an excellent concept to me. I knew what I wanted to do when I left school, but my career (as an opera singer) failed before it even started - though I've had lots of fun singing in choirs of all sorts, and still do. I don't remember getting much in the way of careers information at my rather posh boarding school in the early 1970s - I think we were supposed to just get married and not worry our pretty little heads about careers. My head not being particularly pretty I never got married, and I've lurched from career to career ever since. I've been a stage manager (well, if I couldn't be in the operas, at least I could work on them), book seller, cycle courier, wine merchant and educator, double-glazing telesales person, trainee driving instructor, taxi driver, multi-lingual tour guide... and now I'm a freelance copywriter. It may not be much of a career path, but it's certainly been an interesting life.

So am I saying careers information isn't that necessary - if at first you don't succeed, and all that... ? No, I think the more information you can give kids to help them decide where their talents lie the better. There are loads of jobs that I'd never heard of when I was at school (copywriting being one of them), heaps of possibilities for people with all sorts of varying interests and capabilities, things they might never have dreamed existed.

And if I can help them find the right peg to hang their hat on, that will be a good job too. If you want to get involved, just go to http://www.growingambitions.org/index.php and volunteer.