100th Episode Special: Forget the Career Ladder, Build a Squiggly Career Instead with Helen Tupper

So Helen, we've all heard the term squiggly career, but not everyone realizes that it was actually a phrase that you and your co-founder Sarah Ellis coined back in 2013 on a sketch on a napkin.

Indeed.

And more than a decade later, it's become a part of how people around the world describe their careers.

And Sarah N. and myself both started in law before taking very different paths into higher ed and tech, and your work on Squiggly Careers gave us permission to see those pivots not as failures, but as progress.

And with that, I'd love to start with your own squiggly story.

Before Amazing If, you built an illustrious career across organizations like BP, Virgin, and Microsoft.

So looking back, what was happening beneath the surface that eventually led you to start your company, Amazing If, which is a global career training and development company?

Yeah, I guess first I'll go back to your point about everyone's heard of squiggly.

I don't think they have.

I think there is a lot...

There's a lot of people left to reach with the kind of work that we do on Squiggly Careers, which is exciting.

It's exciting for me because, as you said, we've been doing this over a decade now, and I want to be doing it for the next two, three, four decades, and reach lots of people.

But in terms of my squiggly career and what was going on beneath the surface, before I started to run this company, my career was quite squiggly because I was moving across industries, I was moving across functions, and it was partly because I liked variety.

It was partly because I was driven to learn.

And actually, I think when you are squiggly, you are much more likely to learn, because you are putting yourself into new positions, and you are working in new places and with new people.

So it, it almost creates a constant learning environment for your career, and I've always been very driven by that.

Academically and practically, learning, I think it's just part of my DNA, and my career was a vehicle for that.

So I think part of my squiggliness and what was going on beneath the surface was a desire to keep learning and also a need for freedom.

One of my values, which is one of the squiggly skills, but one of my values is freedom, and so I didn't really want to be constrained.

I didn't want to be put in a box.

I didn't want to be limited by a job title.

I wanted options and possibilities, and I created that for myself.

Um, and then I think in doing that and realizing that was creating so many interesting opportunities for me in my career, the people that I was meeting and the things that I was getting to do, it definitely led to this, wouldn't it be amazing if more people could do that? Why should this just be me who is able to do this? And Sarah, who is business partner but has been a friend since university days, just like both of you, she had a similar insight.

And there was something in our own experience and that sort of question and insight that led us to thinking about Squiggly Careers and thinking about the skills and trying to support people with that.

Even as you're speaking, Helen, you can evidently see that Janice and I were chuckling behind the mics ourselves and just nodding furiously because at the end of the day, it very much reflects our own journey, right? Coming from law into business school, and then for Janice to...