Transferable Skills

30 is the benchmark isn’t it? As a child, I feel like it’s universally accepted that by 30 you’ll have your life together.

In fact, that idea remains pretty prevalent in your mind until one day, all of a sudden, you’re a stone’s throw away from it, you look around the attic/bedroom you’re living in and realise:

“I don’t think I’m gonna make it.”

And there is no clearer indication of this than when trying to start or change careers. Staring at a summary of the last ten years of your working life, with which you’d struggle to get hired as a self-employed freelancer. 

So you start extracting the useful bits from years of low-skilled work, drawing out ‘critical thinking’ from the time you were the most experienced waiter working during a busy shift, or ‘time management’ for almost always turning up on time. I steadily made my way backwards through my own history, using these mental gymnastics (problem-solving? Tick) milking everything I could from it, hoping it would be enough to fill an A4 page with my accomplishments. I stopped just short of my actual first experience, as I felt that it might be a tough sell to take anything from that.

During the third year of secondary school in the U.K., we have a compulsory two weeks of work experience. Some kids would go and work where their parents worked, whereas others like me had to contact companies and hope you sounded sweet enough over the phone. During the early stages of the school year, however, a member of the army came into our class and gave us a presentation on the opportunity to spend a week in barracks, to see what it’s like to become a member of the British Army. Now, ignoring the predatory, propagandist nature of recruiting children as young as 14 from school, I saw it as an opportunity to shirk work and go and do fun stuff in the woods for a week, so I was well up for it. 

Two weeks before the end of the school year, when most of my classmates were arranging their packed lunches and office wear, I was packing my civvies into a rucksack and donning my steel-toed boots. The following Monday morning I was nervously pacing around my house, flicking my dyed black, straightened fringe from my eyes even more regularly than normal. The butterflies in my belly fluttered in unison at the sound of a horn honking for me, so much so that I could feel the twinge in my left hand as I picked up my bag and shouted goodbye to my mum, closing the door behind me. At the end of my drive was an already three-quarters packed minivan with my brothers in arms for the week, driven by my new Captain, and a Lieutenant by his side. I could see both their faces looking out at me, their smiles on the verge of sadistic. As I reach the minivan the Lieutenant gets out to greet me.

“Dower?” He asks.

“Yep!” I say nodding, trying to ignore the sets of eyes peering at me through the back windows, flicking my hair from my face again. 

“Let’s get your bag in the back, and you can jump in the side.” He says, taking my rucksack from my shoulder. “Jesus,” he puffs, “this thing weighs a tonne, did you bring your GHDs along with you?” His brow is furrowed, but his eyes are twinkling to say he’s joking. I laugh, used to comments like these at school. 

“I couldn’t decide whether to bring my pink ones or my black ones, so I brought both.”

The corners of his mouth twitch upwards and he nods his head towards the side, telling me to get in. 

I climb in the side door and I’m confronted by a sea of unknown faces, with one exception. Steven was a kid in my class who’d actually only joined at the beginning of the year, however it was enough of an icebreaker to mean I wasn’t completely alone. Luckily for both of us it turned out that he knew a few of the guys already from his previous school, so the nerves were gone before we’d even turned off of my street. 

The purpose of the week’s training was to give us a taste of what it was like to be in the army. What that meant in theory was us being shown how to march in formation, how to keep our living areas tidy, and how to perform field exercises, all culminating in us combining our new skills to act out a scenario. We would sneak up on an unsuspecting terrorist cell in the woods before dawn, listen to their conversation and collect intel to bring back to base. What it meant in practice wasn’t far off from that, but also involved playing football, being called out of our barracks at 3 in the morning to be berated for making too much noise, and a whole lot more dicking around together. At the end of the week, I said goodbye to my comrades and climbed aboard the minibus to re-enter civilian life, destined for another week of work experience in a doddery old clothes shop, hanging cardigans and scarves in May. 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was only a few years away from putting these skills to use.

At 18, after a spectacularly failed attempt at 6th form I entered the workforce proper. My first real job was in a clothes/bits and bobs store. Now, if at this point I had zoomed out and watched my working progress from a birds eye view, what I would have seen was a stationary, flashing dot on the map. Maybe after a year I would have tapped the screen to check that it was still working, and would see a pixel’s worth of motion. The dot now oscillating between the clothes store and a nightclub bar, a street away from each other. When another year passes, and the dot now ticks in a triangle from the clothes store, a restaurant and studying at college, I might be beginning to lose patience. When all of a sudden the dot flits across the map of the south of England, settling just north of London. University. Film & Television production degree. Bar jobs. Bar jobs. Bar jobs. London? Bar job. Ba- oh wait a second. Runner in a post production house, bringing drinks and food to edito- oh it’s another bar job. 

It’s not until a little later that I land my first, truly-not-a-bar-job job. I mean sure, my job description could be boiled down to stuff-finder-and-bringer, with my path of progression leading me up towards editing assistant, which sounds creative but is in fact the person who arranges all of the technical things for an editor. But I was categorically not making any drinks anymore. I remember the relief I felt at the idea that I had finally broken into something I wanted to do, no longer pigeon holed by what I had on my CV.

10 months later, however, I hit the ejector seat on my life in London and fired myself back out of my comfort zone, flying halfway around the world to try and teach English in Panama. By the time I arrived I could hardly coach myself to leave the hostel I was staying in, so how on earth could I teach a room of children about the present perfect continuous tense? 

I suppose it’s not surprising then that I fell back on what I knew. For half a year I poured cocktails for people on a paradise island, before boomeranging back to where I’d come from, stopping just short, in Belgium. 

When I arrived I was a husk of a person. After a devastating, tumultuous year, all of my reserves of self confidence and self belief had been drained. So, in a new job in the cultural touchstone of the English – the Irish pub, I started to do something that I felt that I was good at again, and it allowed me to regenerate. Whether it was completing the simple task of pouring a pint, or making a table laugh with a well timed quip or remark. It wasn’t long though, until I felt myself outgrowing my current shell. I wanted more, so I began making a new CV to apply for jobs within film and television. The problem was, when I sat down to do it, and I laid out in front of me the experience I could show, it looked less than promising. I scoured the internet for how to spin your CV to make it look more appealing, which is how I learned about soft skills and hard skills. 

To those of you who don’t know, soft skills are things like problem solving or communication, and hard skills are more technical, like being able to write code. I went back to my CV and tried to translate what I’d written into soft skills and hard skills. The soft skills table was looking pretty healthy, however my hard skills were close to threadbare. I could boast some experience in editing many years before, and not much else. I applied voraciously to everything I could find, but it brought back 0 results. The familiar feeling of stuckness I had only a couple of years before managed to shake, gripped me like a vice again.

It wasn’t until a few months later, when during a conversation in a car with a newfound friend, she told me that her stepdad ran a company that was in need of a new video editor, and that she would introduce me. A week later, I had my first trial shift, and a week after that I started on my first proper day. 

I was working on a desk back to back with my new boss. I hadn’t edited anything in over 3 years, and I was feeling a little more than rusty. The night before I started work I had been frantically revising the things I knew, watching YouTube videos on tricks to seem more well versed than I was, but I was certain that at some point or another they would see right through it and tell me to get out. I just didn’t think I would be tested on day one. 

I’d been given the task of adding subtitles to some already edited videos in three different languages, copied and pasted from a form. Simple enough, until my boss adds that if I find any clips with a cable in the shot, that I need to mask it out. I’d been shown once on my trial day how to do this, but I couldn’t quite remember the steps, and I’d never done it before in my own experience of editing. I nod and smile, trying not to give the game away that I had no idea what I was doing, but convinced that he could see me anyway. When he had finished explaining my task to me I excused myself to the bathroom and searched for a 3 minute YouTube video explaining what I needed to do. I was trying to memorise the steps before I went back to my desk, so I could do it without looking like it was the first time I’d ever done it. The video bursts into life much louder than I was expecting, and I frantically lower the volume on my phone so as to stop anyone hearing what I was listening to. At that moment, alone in the cubicle, I suddenly recalled a memory from my time in the army. 

On the first day of army training we were given our uniforms and lined up along a rural path, flanked one side by trees and the other by a field of long grass. 

“Right!” Bellowed Lt. Joker, brow once again furrowed, but with the hint of a smirk on his mouth to say it wasn’t all that serious. “Half of you are going out into that grass, laying down and crawling back towards the path. The other half are going to stand on the road and try to see you before you make it.” He starts by pointing at me. “Get crawling, GHDs.” 

I traipse out along with my assigned squadron, and when given a sign I drop down onto my belly. From the road the grass had looked much taller, but from this perspective it seemed as if I was on display for everyone to see. I start crawling painstakingly slowly towards freedom, watching as someone on the road scans the grass around me. He points out people on either side of me and I see them stand up, defeated. 

In the bathroom at work, the video is finished and I make my way back to the desk to try and implement what I’ve learned. I slide into the seat and flick through the videos hunting for one with a visible cable. I find it, but as I start the process of masking it, my boss turns in his chair to ask me how it’s going. I feel him watching me over my shoulder as I inch through the steps of what I’d just watched, certain I was going to make a glaring mistake that would reveal me for what I was. 

In the grass I’m doing the same. As the guy on the road looks away from me I start crawling, but as he turns back my way and I stop, he stops too. He stares in my direction for what feels like an eternity, and I feel the knot in my stomach tightening. He can see me. I’m certain of it. 

I finish making the mask and try to move the clip, which should move the masked area and allow me to hide the cable. However what it does instead is move the entire image to the right. I feel a twinge of panic go up my back, thinking I’m showing my hand, and that he knows for sure now that I’m not suited for this job. 

He can definitely see me. His eyes are burning holes in me and I can’t take it anymore, knowing he’s about to point in my direction and tell me to get up and leave. I stand up with my hands up.

At the desk I breathe in through my nose and try to ignore the pressure I’ve created for myself. I undo what I’d done, and look through the settings of the mask, seeing a little checkbox marked ‘invert’. 

I walk back towards the path, and to the person who had seen me. 

“The grass is so short! There was nowhere for me to hide!” I call to them, as they look at me quizzically, both Lt. Joker and the boy soldier. The boy pipes up first.

“No, honestly I hadn’t seen you at all. I couldn’t see anyone.” 

I tick the checkbox and try again, now seeing the expected result, as the white background shrouds the cable and hides it from the world. 

“Yeah, all good!” I say, not believing it entirely, but just enough to say it. 

“Great! Well, if you have any questions, just let me know.” My boss says, swivelling in his chair and getting on with his own work, seemingly oblivious to my fears. 

I’m 30 in 3 months from now, and I know, of course, that there’s no such thing as having your life together. That life is merely a conveyor belt of moments that happen, and how you react to them is what matters. I know that, when it comes down to it, the only person you need to prove yourself worthy to is yourself, and that if you are unhappy with the way you reacted to something, learn from it and react differently in the future. I also know that a (nearly) 30 year old dispensing life advice can often cause dislocation of the eyeball from severe rolling, especially when it can be boiled down to something as simple as:

“Be the best you that you can be.”  

But the truth is, at its core, it is that simple. 

Hmm. Maybe I took more from that week with the British Army than I’d thought.