“I need to understand what I need to do to drive a successful career”
Ben Roberts, NHS and Ilker Kurt, Centrica
Ben Roberts
Divisional Accountant - Family Care
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
“The NHS is the biggest employer in Europe, employing 1.3 million people, and healthcare is a very unique industry to work in. The biggest anxiety for myself and other graduates coming off the national scheme is how to choose a career path from all the opportunities an organisation of this size can offer.
The NHS Graduate Scheme responded to this anxiety by engaging Talent & Potential to deliver career management training that would help graduates make rapid progress with their careers. I found that the Talent & Potential workshops went much further than basic CV writing and interview techniques. They showed me the facts about what people with fast-track careers actually do; and challenged me to identify the fundamental values and strengths I wanted to build a career on. This gave me a long-term sense of direction, rather than focusing from one job to the next, and gave me the confidence to take career leaps that are driving my career forward.
The Drive Your Career sessions have changed the way I view my career, and taken it from the back burner to the centre of everything I do. It helped me to leave the scheme with one of the highest banded roles available to graduates, and has recently resulted in a suggestion from a senior manager that I take on his role when he moves on! Since the sessions took place, I think it would be fair to say I’ve been using the tools and techniques I learnt on a daily basis. In the first 12 months since the initial session I’ve achieved more than I would have thought possible - a quotation in a national newspaper, writing articles on healthcare management and becoming an advocate by delivering talks on careers in the NHS.
I always get asked during the talks I give ‘What would you have done differently if you got to do it again?’
Basically the answer is – I wish I’d known and been able to apply what I learnt from Drive Your Career earlier."
Ilker Kurt
Group Financial Risk Manager, Centrica
“I got the chance to go on Drive Your Career 2 years ago, as one of the courses that Centrica provide for their managers. It was a course that made a remarkable change to my thinking process, with tangible benefits.
One key moment was when we went through the exercise on establishing a career brand, to come up with a 2-minute summary of what I do best. I realised that the thing I enjoyed most was going into a situation where I had to build relationships with stakeholders from very different backgrounds and nationalities, bring them together, and motivate them behind a common goal, to create real change and improvement. It was an ‘Aha!’ moment where I thought – I’ve never articulated that clearly before. Every time I need to talk about myself this is the first thing I now think of, who I am, what I bring to the table.
There are many other things I still think of and take action on, like the importance of communicating good news. Management want to hear about progress and good things happening, not always the problems and difficulties. And the Career Tactics card pack from the workshop has found a permanent place in my briefcase. I pull it out whenever I have moments here and there as I travel around Europe.
In my early career, I worked for 6 different companies, with an average time in each company of under 2 years. Drive Your Career showed me how to drive my career internally, and in the 2 years since attending the workshop I have been promoted twice - from Market Risk Manager to Senior Market Risk Manager to my current position of Group Financial Risk Manager. I think that being able to articulate my brand and my achievements was a big part of getting appointed to my current role in the face of stiff competition."
