Building career resilience

Transcript

Thank you, Michelle! I was actually expecting something a bit more embarrassing, so thanks very much.

So I'm gonna be talking about building career resilience. Who am I? I am Julia. I'm a senior software engineer at Serko. I'm a mum of two young girls, Eden and Thea, and they are three and a half and nine months old. So I'm still deep in the trenches of small children.

I'm also the co-founder and CTO of the Fractional Directory. And I'll talk to you a bit more about that later. I know some people are asking what that is.

So back in November, I had a totally different speech prep. And in the last six months, my perspective has changed a lot. I'm not gonna pretend that I have all the answers or try to tell you how to build a resilient career. Because if I'm honest, my journey is just starting. But instead, I'm gonna share a bit about how I've built my own resilient career by finding a new path when the one that I was on didn't fit anymore.

So let's start with my big career goal. Throughout my career, I've been just a teeny tiny bit ambitious. I set a goal to be CTO by the time I was 40. I've always been a tick box checker and a planner. And so I've always had an idea of what I want to do in my career. So going to university, graduating, getting junior dev, intermediate dev, senior dev was easy, tick, tick, tick.

And what was next? All right, let's go for CTO. Why? I think the only real motivator at the time in my 20s was to win the corporate ladder. And why age 40? Because apparently that's when you have your life together, right? I'm 33 now and I think I'm still a bit, I'm still pretty far away from that.

So I got to senior, now what? And before I could decide, we made an impulsive plan to move to London and party and travel for two years. Cool, never mind. I just picked back up after that.

And then COVID. Uh-oh! Okay, let's move back home. Let's start a family. My career will be fine. I'd hop right back on the ladder, right? I wouldn't let this stop me.

I was ambitious. I was motivated. I was resilient.

So what happened next? This is me and Michelle in May of 2022. So pretty much exactly three years ago. I was just coming back from maternity leave after having my first daughter. And I thought everything was going to be the same when I got back. I'd get back on the ladder in the same spot I'd hopped off and everything would go back to normal.

But what I was really thinking was everything was the same, except for me, and I had changed. I had a small child to care for and a husband working overseas. So my capacity was at an all-time low. So maybe I do nothing for the next year.

Instead, fast forward to July the following year. Michelle and I were soft launching the Fractional Directory, which we were calling fractional. We were calling it our side project, which has since become our company and tech startup. I was working full-time. I was solo parenting and I was building a company. Everyone told me I was superwoman. I was doing it all and that that should be something I should be really proud of.

But what was really happening was I was completely burned out. I felt like an imposter and every day was a struggle. And then a wise friend, thanks Michelle, said, "You're flying too close to the sun." And she was right, but I just couldn't see it yet. But what I did know was that I was not on the path to a resilient career. And it wasn't a ladder, was it? It was more of a mountain with peaks and troughs like I was experiencing. You can see you go up, you get your promotion, you get really excited. Then you get tired, you get burned out, you're working too hard.

So if I was following this ladder now, to get to the top of CTO right at the peak, where would I be? Where would I be on this path today? Well, in my corporate career, I am there as senior dev.

And where would I be if I'd made some different life choices? I mean, I could be higher. But it's still a really tall mountain to climb. And it's really hard to carry two children up this mountain. But why? Why is it so hard? Well, because kids are heavy.

But in reality, it was these three questions that were haunting me. Where are my female role models? I went on LinkedIn and I searched CTOs in New Zealand. And I think I hit the fifth or sixth page just to find a female CTO that I could really relate to. So finding a mentor is going to be near on impossible. And I know that the work expectations on leaders and execs can be 60 plus hour work weeks, conferences, travel.

I didn't have the capacity to do that with young kids. And if I waited until they were grown, I might have missed my opportunity. So that leads into the next question. How can I do this without burning out? I knew I could do hard things, sure, and push myself to the limit. But at what cost? Just because I could. Doesn't mean I should. And that's not how you build a resilient career.

So what's next? If CTO is out of the question for the foreseeable future, what do I do? Do I keep climbing? Do I give it a few years and see what happens? Do I give up altogether? Well, that's not me.

So what about fractional CTO? Quick show of hands. Who knows what fractional or fractional leadership is? Yeah, pretty much roughly what I expected. This is an emerging market. So let me tell you a bit about it.

A fractional is a leader that works less than their full-time capacity as the most senior level domain expert in their company. And the fractional directory is a business directory that lists everyone working in this way, working fractionally in both New Zealand and Singapore. And as of, I think, last month, we've just gone over a thousand people in total, which is really exciting. And I think when we started in 2023, we started with 40 people. So it's grown a lot over the last couple of years.

I also really believe that fractional leadership has a structure for a resilient career. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But first, what is a fractional CTO? Surprise, it's me. So I've actually achieved my goal by 33 instead of 40. And I'm a fractional CTO for a startup. So maybe I should just end here.

At the fractional directory, we have what we've built as a qualification engine. It categorizes people based on their skills and deliverables that they can offer to companies. And going through and creating my own profile in my own company has shown me that I actually have those skills. So instead of continuing to trudge up what seemed like an impossible mountain, I found a new one. It had a smaller peak, but it was far steeper and completely unmarked. And let's just be clear. I'm not planning on leaving my role at Serko. It's got an amazing culture and a team that have actively supported me on my journey.

The whole point here is that it's not all or nothing. I found a great corporate career and I'm building a startup. Those things can coexist and I've been able to have stability in my life while also growing as a leader. So what are the benefits to being a fractional leader? For me, it's a more realistic path to a resilient career. You can scale your work and work commitments up and down during different phases of life. And you can have space for more than just work.

After COVID, I think we all value time outside of work more and are demanding more flexibility in our careers. So whether that's space for hobbies, travel, family or all of the above, this gives you the opportunity to have that. And you can work with your brain, not against it. And what does that mean? Well, some people like to chip away at something day by day and achieve it in incremental lumps. And that is just not how I work. If you give me a two-week deadline, I will do it two days before. If you give me a four-week deadline, I will do it two days before. I will do it at the last responsible moment because that's when my brain hits peak creativity and productivity. So being able to work with your natural rhythm is really important.

So this is my mountain. You can see it's got peaks and troughs just like the traditional mountain to CTO. And on here are a couple of things that I've achieved or gone through over the last couple of years. And you can see almost at the top, that's us today. And just below, I started calling myself a fractional CTO. Now I've been doing it for a while, but I've just started calling myself that openly. And today is the first time on stage. It's taken time to get comfortable with all my separate identities and finding a way that they can coexist.

And if I've already achieved my goal, then what's next? Well, as I mentioned, I'm the fractional CTO of a startup. And that is in no way a comparison to the CTO of a corporate enterprise. What I've done instead is scaled a different peak that I can then move to other ones in the future if I wanted to.

So here's what I've learned on the mountain. Everyone's is different. You can't compare your point of your climb with someone else. They might just be starting or coming to the end. Maybe they're taking a breather or maybe they're busy sprinting up their own peak.

Watch out for potholes. When you're doing hard things, there will be things on the path that will try to trip you up. And usually this is your inner critic. It's basically trying to keep you safe by scaring you back down the mountain. But in order to move forward, you need to recognize these for what they are. Mental trash. Acknowledge them and then step over and move on.

Walk, run, rest. What does this mean? Well, people love to talk about the work-life balance as if there's some perfect moment. When everything's in harmony, your work, your family, your energy, your inbox. But this is just a myth.

In real life and on a mountain trail, you can't carry everything all at once. So some days you choose what's essential for the climb ahead and you have to drop the rest. In real life, what does that mean? Maybe work is your focus and you don't text your friends back. And your house gets really messy. Maybe you miss a deadline because your kids are sick. Or maybe you just need a break and everything else has to wait. And this leads me into don't climb alone. Resilience isn't personal, it's collective.

And you need to find a way to build a team. Whether that's friends and family, a supportive team at work, or just a single trusted friend or manager. You have to get okay with asking for help if you want to be able to move forward. Okay.

And what's really important here with doing it as a team is the fractional directory. While it's just me and Michelle, it's so much more than that. And we couldn't have possibly built what we've built while having kids without our core team of fractional professionals, a wider team of consultants, freelancers and incredibly talented friends. We couldn't have done it without our family and friends who probably don't understand why we're so insane, but support us anyway.

And that brings me to the last point and I'm going to leave you here to celebrate how far you've climbed. I know when you're staring straight up the mountain, it's really easy to get tunnel vision. But it's really important to stop and look back and see how far you've climbed so far and you have to celebrate every single one.

And that is how I built my resilient career. How are you going to build yours?

Thank you!