Mastering your own destiny: why not every career has to have a niche

Words by Carolyn Heslop

‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. The last part of that phrase is meant to be negative, like if you focus your efforts across numerous ‘trades’, you can’t master any of them. I disagree. The only thing you can guarantee in life is that it will change. Flexibility is key.

Having a niche or a specialism is impressive for sure. To be an expert in a particular subject or skill will always be valuable, but I believe true power lies in having a few or more things you are good at or are passionate about. That way you can switch between them, and more options are open to you. When it comes to my career, I follow the ‘variety is the spice of life’ train of thought.

I started working aged 15. Don’t panic, I wasn’t in a Dickens novel, sent up the chimneys to earn my keep, it was a paper round before school. Since that first job I’ve had 12 others and they’ve been as varied as British weather.

I’ve learned a lot from every one of my 13 jobs, but rather than go through each one and most certainly bore you, I’ve decided to share with you my three superpowers (yes, ‘tis I, Writer Girl) and tell you about the industries/jobs that have developed them.

Patience: books and Labradors

Anyone who has worked in any kind of customer service role will either have the patience of a saint or a well-developed coping strategy for facing the public. I have worked in a pet shop, fast-food drive through, and a bookshop; I can be both infinitely patient and liable to sit in a dark room screaming after a day’s work just to process the horror. Both effective, but let’s focus on my patience shall we?

I think you get bonus points if you can work in retail over the festive period and I worked in the bookshop at Christmas two years running. I spent most of my time helping people through their shopping list of tomes for their nearest and dearest while the queue behind them grew longer and longer, and locating books based off information as vague as: “the spine is blue”.

Patience was also my saving grace when books took a long time to order, arrive in paperback, or be written by George R.R. Martin.

Another job that required infinite patience was being a Guide Dogs for the Blind handler. Now this was an epic job that most people can’t believe I would ever want to leave, and trust me it was hard, but they do say never work with children and animals for a reason. The dogs are fantastic and yes, you do get to essentially play with them a lot of the day. But you are also training them to help the partially sighted and blind, so it’s a serious job.

You have a pack of excitable dogs with you that each requires individual handling and training to get them to where they (and eventually a blind person) need to be. As much as capitalism has permeated most existences, dogs remain blissfully unaware of ‘jobs’ and ‘work ethic’, so they just want to be, well, a dog.

I am most grateful for my time at Guide Dogs for the steadiness it brought to my personality. Dogs pick up on how you feel, so I had to learn to act calm and collected even if I wasn’t. I would imagine my emotions travelling down the lead into the fluffy rebel at the other end and I needed them to be as focussed and diligent as me. Once the harness was off, we could play.

Tenacity: publishing and pubs

I love to read. Books have been a passion since I was small and, not to spoil the ending for you, but I became a (copy)writer. However, for a long time I wanted to work in the traditional publishing industry. You know, the one where you’re a hotshot editor at Penguin and you go for lunch with authors every day. It’s not happened (yet) but I have had two internships, been an editorial assistant, and the deputy editor of a magazine. I’d say the skill I developed most from all these roles was tenacity.

To make it into the industry itself takes grit and determination. You’re up against a lot of competition and it’s still an issue that a lot of the major publishing houses are based in London, inaccessible to so many worthy candidates.

I faced the most rejection in my career from this industry, internships and job roles alike were seemingly impossible to secure. Success came for me when I got accepted to the Columbia Publishing Course in New York, where I met so many influential people in publishing my head spun. But even then, networking events, going up against friends on my course for the same jobs, and trying to convince editors I would be invaluable to them took constant perseverance.

Once you’re in, you need to take that tenacity and channel it into keeping up with your peers too. Publishing is about who you know and commercial awareness, which I was only so good at, but I certainly left that industry with a lot more backbone than I went in with.

The same goes for working in a pub. It might seem odd that I put this job role here and not in with the other customer-facing ones, but being behind a bar in a really busy pub is harder than I think we give people credit for. Drunk customers can be a challenge and courage is vital.

As a woman, working in a pub where to collect glasses you had to squeeze yourself in between large groups of men and you were often on the receiving end of comments so laden with misogyny you’d be hard pressed to believe it wasn’t 1952, I honed my superpower of tenacity.