In defense of the unexciting

Increasingly, I find myself reflecting back on my early career with a hint of longing. Maybe it’s just a symptom of getting older, but I look back on those days and think about how simple everything was.

Of course, it’s a little bit of a fantasy for several reasons, the most obvious being that things weren’t that simple back then. My life was simple. I didn’t have to make big decisions — at least not at work — I had limited responsibility. Outside of my bubble, however, things were very complicated. I’ve mentioned before, but I started my professional career at the tail end of the global financial crisis and shortly after joining an international education provided, the bird flu hit.

A lot of people were forced to make very difficult decisions during that period, but I wasn’t one of them, and consequently, my main focus was on wanting to progress as fast as possible so that I could be in a position to make those decisions. Youth is wasted on the young.

There are a number of direct throughlines between my first job and where I am now. The first is that I happened to land a job in international education. Another is that I worked in marketing and communications, so I learnt how to communicate and how not to communicate — with an emphasis on not.

In fact, a lot of what I would eventually learn and bring through to other roles, including this one, was a lot of what not to do and how not to do it. Later, once I’d learnt to do a task, the next step was to how to do it consistently well. It was unexciting, but it was simple.

Recently, universities, and dare I say the wider education ecosystem, has started to become more comfortable with providing students the opportunity to safely fail. Within formalised education, there can be very little room for missteps. Competitiveness for university places can create a system where entrants, and later graduates, have near-perfect academic records who have a deep theoretical understanding, but limited practical “real world” application.