Staff Biography written by Mr C Russell-Thompson

Staff Biography written by Mr C Russell-Thompson

Biography written by Mr C. Russell-Thompson

What are your top five skills?

Writing; proof-reading; database management and maintenance; graphic design; illustration.

What are your interests?

I play piano and do a lot of digital illustration. Lockdown has been great for finding my love of reading again, and my partner is teaching me to crochet. I also play more videogames than I care to admit.

What is your current job role?

I’m the Assistant to the Senior Leadership Team at John Cabot Academy. I help the Principal and her team by managing their diaries, overseeing school communications to parents, and helping with lots of short- and long-term projects.

I’ll soon be starting work at UWE as an Executive Support Administrator.

What was your previous job role?

I was a Research Assistant at the Behavioural Insights Team, which is a branch of the Cabinet Office. I travelled around the country conducting surveys and interviews in schools to assess whether the Envision Community Apprentice programme was having a positive effect on young people.

What were you like at school, and what were your ambitions?

I was quite a shy and retiring student. And being LGBT, I always felt like a bit of a misfit. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my career, and to be honest I still don’t! To be honest, my main ambition has always been to live peacefully and have a good work-life balance. In other words, I’d rather spend time with my partner and my family than have status for its own sake.

It’s complicated! I took French, English Lit and History at A-Level and studied English Lit at Warwick. I then went to Bath Spa to train as an English Teacher; but in the end, I decided I did not want to teach, and started to work in special educational needs provisions as an autism specialist. This led to a master’s degree in Educational Psychology and my Research Assistant job. I then started looking for permanent work, and after about 40 different applications to various employers I finally got my current admin job at JCA.

So, I’ve been working in the secondary education for eight years, in a few very different roles. It’s been really useful in my current job to know what it’s like to be a teacher and a learning support worker – it helped me to understand the professional needs of the people I was working with, and to provide a good service to them. Now I’m leaving the sector to work at a university, but a lot of the IT and people skills I’ve picked up will be transferrable to any role I take on in the future.

It used to bother me that my job history wasn’t flashy, but nowadays I am really happy with the skills and outlook that it’s given me. It’s important to be adaptable and to remember that you don’t need to follow some kind of inflexible “grand plan”. I am so glad I looked for quality of life instead of chasing after status.

Do you plan to continue with any education or training?

My master’s degree gives me a foundation to train to be an Educational Psychologist – a 3-year PhD programme that I might apply to one day.

My advice to you.

It’s easy to compare your journey with others, and even to end up frustrated with where you are in your career, but remember that everyone has a different path through life. We all start from different positions of advantage and disadvantage, so go at your own pace, not somebody else’s.

Don’t get caught in the rat race: put your career in perspective. As a culture we often fixate on finding “your passion” – which normally means finding one thing you do really well and love doing. But I think it is better for your mental health to ask yourself: “what makes me content? What do I need from my life in order to feel fulfilled?”