I was on the Tonight Programme on ITV1 on the 2nd September – if you haven’t yet seen it, you can watch it here… ITV1 – Tonight Programme – The Working Life – how to get a job with James Caan. It speaks into the turmoil in the markets with ordinary people struggling to find work and how they might be unwittingly limiting themselves and how to overcome any of these factors.
Yesterday I delivered the third in a series of lectures for Big Fish, the digital filmmaking school in South Africa. Such an eye-opener for me to experience at first hand the commonalities between the young English graduate I coached for the Tonight Programme and the students of Big Fish – many of whom are about to go into the real world of work in South Africa.
What they all have in common is a good, albeit theoretical understanding of what’s out there, which I put down to digital media. Saying this even with the ability to research everything online, very few had a real savvy sense of what it means to live their values, how to build their personal brands and to get on in the world of work. And even fewer had a real connection to taking full responsibility for consciously causing the effects they want to see in their lives. Fortunately coaching and lectures work… students are keen to take everything on board and we are in the process of co-creating a new and ‘switched-on’ way forward.
And the differences are as ever all cultural… here in South Africa I really believe we need to go some way in supporting young women to not only study, but to build their own careers before falling into the trap of ‘becoming a woman’ by having babies from get-go.
Note: Big Fish is NGO run by Dr Melanie Chait and is doing great work – let me know if you would like to support what they are up to and I will put you in touch.