An Open Letter to Tech Recruiters

Dear Tech Recruiters (and by extension, the clients you work for),

A recruiter messaged me directly last week, which should have been a good thing. An actual person reaching out - wow! 

Then they sent through the job ad itself: an AI-generated checklist so long and so specific that no real human could tick every box unless they were already doing the exact same job on the exact same stack at a direct competitor. The contrast between the personal touch and the impersonal wishlist was jarring, but sadly common in 2026.

The problem today is that AI has changed recruitment, and made it much, much worse. I want you to understand how this all looks to people like me.

First up - I've read enough job ads over the years to build up a "Hall of Fame" of recruitment nonsense, which I present to you now. My simple advice for all of these - do not do this.

Job Ads Hall of Fame

1. The vendor-specific must-have

Candidates must have direct hands-on experience in [Specific Platform].

A while ago I worked at a place which used a CMS I wasn't familiar with. But I've got 2 decades of experience in other CMS's, and 3 decades in tech. I asked a developer to talk me through the architecture, and as soon as he explained it, I could relate my existing knowledge to the new platform.

If you're in a leadership role, the skill is understanding the functionality, being able to define the problem, and knowing how to achieve the required outcomes. Functionally, every CMS, every CRM, every email system, every operating system, and every AI platform, does the same thing as its competitors. Learning one specific piece of software doesn't mean you understand the functionality and processes and decision making required to achieve the best outcome. Screening someone out for a technology leadership role based on a specific vendor is shooting yourselves in the foot.

2. The narrow sector obsession

Essential: minimum X years experience within [Specific Sector].

Modern software doesn't behave differently depending on which industry runs it. Sector context matters for some roles, but for most tech positions this requirement just shrinks the pool for no real gain. A technologist who's worked across sectors usually brings new ideas, concepts and processes that the narrow-industry-focused haven't considered. Screening someone out for a technology leadership role based on the sectors they've worked in previously is a nonsense.

3. The impossible experience requirement

10 years of experience as a pre-sales or engineering manager in relation to AI.

I've already covered this one: Google wanting someone with 10 years of AI experience. When I posted that on LinkedIn I got massive engagement, mostly the laughing emoji. It boggles the mind that this needs to be said out loud but - if your role requires more years of experience than the technology has existed, you are effectively telling us all exactly why we don't want to work for your company. Please apply some logic here.

4. The combination

Must have: [Specific Tool] certification plus X+ years in [Specific Sector].

This one combines several or all of the above. The only person who ticks every box is already doing this exact job, on this exact stack, in this exact sector, at a competitor. Which begs the question - why would they leave? And more importantly - why bother running an ad, when you know exactly who you're targeting - just pick up the phone and try to headhunt them!

5. The mystery salary

Salary: Competitive.

This tells me nothing, except that you're OK with me wasting an hour crafting an application for a role before finding out the role pays $50k less than my last role. A simple dollar range would save everyone some trouble.

6. The obviously AI-written ad

We are seeking a dynamic, results-driven professional who will leverage cutting-edge technology to drive transformative outcomes in a fast-paced environment — someone who can seamlessly wear multiple hats while championing innovation at every touchpoint.

You can spot these in the first sentence, and that em dash is a dead giveaway. It seems everyone wants a dynamic, results-drive professional and keyword keyword keyword these days. Please understand that when you post a job ad that sounds like a computer has generated it, you are telling us an awful lot about your organisation that maybe you're not intending to tell us.

Next up, we have all the ways candidates cop the raw end of the deal.

Bad Behaviour

• The keyword-blast. Recruiters who've clearly run your CV through their keyword-matching software, without reading it, and then send "opportunities" that have little to no relevance to your actual skillset or stated preferences.
  
  
• The silent rejection. A form email with no phone call and no feedback, when at senior level a 5-minute call costs almost nothing and leaves a completely different impression.
  
  
• No rejection at all. You apply and simply never hear back, not even the generic form email. We know you have the automated systems to send that email, it's one click, and that's bad but it's still better than nothing.
  
  
• The fake recruiter. A dodgy recruiter has basically stolen a job ad from a job board and started contacting potential candidates directly. Why do they do this? Unclear, but it gives the whole industry a bit of a bad odour.
  
  
• The junior who manages the boss's LinkedIn account. As a candidate you may assume you're connecting with the senior recruitment expert on LinkedIn who understands both sides of the industry and is best placed to help you find the perfect role. And you would likely be wrong. You're just as likely to be talking to the office junior who operates that account on their behalf, and the senior expert never sees anything you've said.
  
  
• AI interviews. Yes, the absolute best way to assess potential candidates is to put them in front of an AI bot as a first-round interview. Nothing speaks "cultural fit" and "positive work environment" like assessment-via-algorithm and the subliminal message that we're too busy to actually talk to you.
  
  
• Recruiter wars. Two recruiters call you within minutes of each other about the same role, then spend more energy fighting over who called first than actually finding you a job, and somehow one of them ends up angry at you for it. (This really happened to me).
  
  
• The non-compete trap. Recruiter-mediated contracts sometimes lock the candidate out of working directly with the client for a year after the contract ends. This does nothing for either the candidate or the client, it's purely to protect the recruiter's ongoing commission.

• The fake job ad. Comes in three flavours: the same ad recycled every few months while a recruiter quietly harvests CVs for their database, the ad for a role that's already been informally filled but still has to be publicly advertised, and the outright scam ad whose entire goal is separating you from your cash.

I'm sure there are more, and I'll keep adding them as I think of them (or experience them).

Understanding Tech People

The appeal of a career in technology for people like me, is the endless supply of new puzzles to solve. 

Job ads like the Hall of Fame give a whiff of "you must conform to exactly what we need" rather than "this is a place where we will value your contribution and you will learn and grow". A checklist like the one I received tells me that the recruiter is inundated by AI-generated slop CVs and is running a drastic slash-and-burn using AI, to narrow down the list and identify CVs with the most ticks, and this isn't really about people at all any more. 

The rest of the Bad Behaviour section is just more of the same - recruiters and organisations optimising for their own efficiency, and leaving candidates dealing with the consequences.

Technology Should Make Things Better For People

My philosophy around technology has always been that it should make things better for the people or organisations using it. So it's reasonable to ask who's actually better off with AI-assisted recruitment, and I've come to the conclusion that:

• Job seekers aren't, since AI-written ads and AI-run screening have made it harder to get an application in front of a human.
  
  
• Companies aren't, since filtering this hard on tick-box criteria screens out capable people before anyone gets an opportunity to assess whether they're any good.
  
  
• Recruiters aren't, since they're flooded with applications which make it much harder for them to genuinely match the right person to the right role.

Excellent.

Looking Forward

Where does this leave us all? A few months ago I asked an AI tool to review my own CV, only to discover it was being identified as a beautifully optimised, circa-2010 CV. So I used AI to help me optimise it - for AI. I joked to a recruiter that AI writes the job ad, AI cross-posts it to every job board going, candidates use AI to mass-apply, and recruiter systems use AI to filter the applications. But where do the people fit in?!

Recently, a director of AI posted on LinkedIn about hiring for positions on his own team. Every resume he received was, in his words, "identical. Not similar. Identical." Flawlessly formatted and perfectly keyword-matched to the job description, to the point where he couldn't tell where the resume ended and the person began. He couldn't even use AI to sort the candidates, because when everyone feeds the same job ad into the same tools, the outputs come out looking much the same. His conclusion was that the most valuable signal left in an AI-run hiring process is evidence an actual human wrote it.

I left a comment under that post, which got more engagement than most of my own posts: "And the problem with not optimising for ATS is that you can't get through to an actual human in the first place. What a hopeless conundrum we've created. 😂"

I've got decades in the tech industry and I'm a strong candidate for a lot of roles, but all of these AI "enhancements" to recruitment only make me less likely to apply. I doubt I'm the only one.

The recruitment process is badly broken...

Regards,
A candidate your checklist just screened out, again.

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Using AI to review and optimise your CV

A couple of months ago I returned from a sabbatical and, out of curiosity, asked claude.ai to assess my 2025-version CV the way an ATS (automated recruitment screening) system would.

Turns out I'd nailed it - it was perfectly optimised - for 2010, which was a little confronting. 😂 

The advice back then was to stuff in as many keywords as possible so you'd get indexed in recruiters' databases. Most people with a tech-based CV from even earlier had a "Technical Summary" page which listed every product name you'd ever laid eyes on. I'd removed that but kept the keywords and it used to work pretty well. But systems got more efficient, AI got added, and I hadn't updated enough to stay relevant.

I ended up working through a process using AI to help me to audit and rebuild it. Everything went into a master document, which means now I can pull together a tailored CV for a specific job application in about fifteen minutes. It took some time to set up but I'm quite pleased with how it works now.

I joked with a recruiter recently that AI writes their job ad, AI cross-posts ad to recruiter website and job boards, potential candidate uses AI to mass-apply for roles, recruiter systems use AI to filter - where are the people?! It's not really a joke though. If you're applying for roles and hearing nothing back, it's worth considering whether your CV is actually reaching a human. 

Learn more about What AI actually does well on the ENVEE Digital blog.

This article was first published on LinkedIn 

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"So, how was your weekend?" 😂

I read an interview with a female CEO in the The Australian Financial Review the other day (unfortunately paywalled so I can't share it), and she was asked what was the most valuable career advice she'd ever received. Her answer - "treat people the way they want to be treated."

This reminded me of a workshop I attended in the early 2000s, run internally by the global software company I worked for at the time. All the project managers were put through Myers-Briggs and DiSC assessments and spent the day learning how to apply that understanding when working with others - not just to understand themselves but also to learn to recognise what other people actually needed from an interaction.

The instructor started with a story I've always found amusing. Like a lot of us, he'd grown up being taught to treat others the way he wanted to be treated - "do unto others" - and he'd recently worked out that wasn't quite right.

He was a chatty guy, the type who liked a bit of small talk and would ask about your weekend before getting down to business. He just got a new boss, who was logical, direct, always on the move and clearly just wanted to get sh*t done. The working relationship was proving challenging and the instructor was starting to think about moving on.

Then he did this same workshop and worked out he was a high "I" in DiSC (Influence), and his boss was quite likely a high "D" (Dominance). So he changed his approach. Instead of the friendly small talk, he started opening his boss's door and saying "Morning - about that report - do you want option A or B? And then should I do C or D?" The relationship improved almost immediately.

A few weeks later he was at his desk on a Monday morning when his boss came over, leaned casually on the edge and asked "So, how was your weekend?". Yep - the boss had just done the same workshop. 😂 

I've thought about that story a lot over the years, and told it a few times myself - particularly to IT teams, where the "us and them" dynamic with the rest of the business can take on a life of its own. It's a really effective way to demonstrate the point about how to get the best outcome from an interaction. It helped shape how I approach leading teams, work with clients and navigate organisations - by trying to work out what someone else actually needs from an interaction, rather than defaulting to what I'D want. I realised much later that's basically the foundation for Design Thinking, although we didn't have the name for that then.

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn 

Cover image: By User:JakeBeech - MyersBriggsTypes.png, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

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Interview with Institute of Community Directors - Boards urged to close tech gap

A couple of weeks ago I had a great chat with Matthew Schulz, a journalist at Our Community, after my post about the board pipeline problem for technology professionals.

That article landed earlier today - in the inboxes of more than 60,000 NFP leaders across Australia. That's a LOT more people than I expected to be talking to when I originally wrote about my own frustrating experience applying for board roles!

The piece covers the structural catch-22 that keeps technology expertise out of boardrooms: you can't get board experience without being on a board. Boards see the risk of appointing someone without governance history as more manageable than the risk of not having tech expertise - but that's a choice about which risk to accept, not an absence of risk. And right now, most boards are choosing the risk they understand less.

Ben McEvoy from Digital Directors ANZ puts the scale of it plainly: at the current rate, Australian boardrooms are on track to have one director with digital expertise by 2078. That's tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying governance problem it describes is real - and it applies well beyond the NFP sector.

If you work with or on boards, or are a technology professional who's been through the experience-required merry-go-round, worth a read.

Click here to read the article by the Institute of Community Directors Australia 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Career decisions

I withdrew from a job process this week, for a role I was genuinely excited about, which has had me feeling a little disappointed with the week.

The organisation ticked almost every box, including a solid Glassdoor rating. The role looked interesting, the boss's LinkedIn profile looked promising, and the conversations with the recruiter had been great. And then I sat down over the Easter long weekend with a bunch of solid Red Tulip Easter eggs and a glass of wine and started to think about the commute, which I'd pushed aside in my excitement about the role - 40 kilometres from home on a toll road and no public transport options.

The thing is, I already knew how this ends, because I worked in that exact location 25 years ago when I was considerably younger and it was theoretically much easier. At the end of that contract they wanted to extend and I just couldn't do it, because I'd started to detest the driving and it was wearing me down. I swore I'd never work there again.

And yet there I was, genuinely considering it, because I'd let the excitement of a potentially great role do the thinking for me, instead of using the part of my brain that remembers what it actually feels like to crawl home on the freeway on a rainy dark night in the middle of July, on repeat.

Withdrawing wasn't easy, especially with an interview already scheduled. But I just knew that three months in, things would feel even harder.

I joke about "old age" but it's actually great to be in a place to still feel the excitement, have the experience to sit with it for a bit and then apply some logic, and end up in the best place for right now. 😊 

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Australian Boards and Technology Governance

 

My husband attended the AICD Australian Governance Summit in Sydney earlier this month. He called me a couple of times to check in and give me a run down.

Almost every session, he said, touched on AI and technology governance, and the urgent need for boards to have more digital expertise.

I've just read the AICD's report on AI use by directors and boards (link to their post in the comments). It's thoughtful and well-researched. It talks about AI literacy, the risks of directors using public AI tools on sensitive board papers and the importance of human judgment remaining central to governance. It doesn't mention the pipeline problem though.

I hold the AICD Foundations of Directorship credential and an MBA. I have 30 years of hands-on technology experience across enterprise, NFP and SME organisations. I've reported directly to boards and CEOs on technology strategy and risk. By the AICD's own definition, I'm exactly the kind of person they're saying boards need.

I also can't get onto a board without prior board experience. And I can't get prior board experience without being on a board. 🤯 

This isn't a new problem. Australian boards have long operated as a relatively closed system, with roles going to people who already hold board roles - predominantly lawyers and finance professionals, predominantly older and with limited technology expertise. ASIC Chair Joe Longo noted recently that directors with a technology background represent less than 8% of Australian boards, numbers which have scarcely changed in the past year.

Now the institutions that built that system are saying boards urgently need people with technology and AI expertise. The people who actually have that expertise at depth are, on average, not lawyers or CPAs, younger, and mostly haven't yet accumulated the governance CVs that get you into the room.

I don't have a clean solution to this. Boards are genuinely trying to grapple with a fast-moving space, and the AICD report reflects that seriously.

I do think it's worth naming the gap between the problem being described and the structural barriers preventing it from being solved.

AICD report referenced in this post - AI use by directors and boards: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/australianinstituteofcompanydirectors_boardroom-conversations-are-shifting-from-activity-7441589560666615808-xx4H/ 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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"Well, you're still an executive"

A couple of months ago I met a woman at a networking event - someone I'd connected with on LinkedIn but never met in person.

She asked what I did.

I said I was coming off a sabbatical. My kids call it my 'Gap Year', which I'd started to find quite funny. I made a little joke about technically not being an executive at the moment.

She looked at me and said: "Well, you're still an executive" and then we moved on to small talk.

I've been thinking about those five words ever since.

She didn't make a big thing of it. Just a statement of fact, delivered matter-of-factly, from someone who had no reason to be anything other than honest.

But she was right. I'd spent months using my kids' affectionate framing for a period that was actually a deliberate pause, to recover, recalibrate and work out what came next. Somewhere in there I'd started to believe the lighter version of the story.

That one comment quietly triggered something in my brain.

In the weeks since, I've rebuilt my entire professional presence - rewritten and rebuilt my website, updated my profiles, set up systems that make me more effective, and started applying selectively for some senior roles that would really mean something to me.

One comment. Five words.

I don't know if she remembers saying it. I doubt it meant much to her.

It meant quite a lot to me though. ❤️ 

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Masters of Business Administration (MBA) completed

Very happy to have formally completed my MBA with distinction this afternoon at the RMIT University Graduation Ceremony! 🎓❤️ 

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"The Magic of McDonald's"

I've just finished reading "The Magic of McDonald's" by former CEO and Chairman of McDonald's Australia, Pete Ritchie. I was lucky enough to work in the Melbourne office from 1990-1996, and even for a young female who hadn't come through the store system, training and performance management was a very high priority across the organisation - Macca's basically trained me into an IT professional. 

It turned out the 90s was a truly great time to work there, and I'll always be grateful for the friends I made, the opportunities I had and the lessons I learned. Reading about the performance appraisal system made me giggle - how could I forget?! Growing up with a Dutch Oma, my interpersonal approach was somewhat "lock and load" just like hers, at a time when young women weren't quite so forthright. My first 3 appraisals went along the lines of "you're doing this, this and this well, but we need to talk about your tact and diplomacy skills". At the 4th year appraisal, I asked "are we doing tact and diplomacy again?" and the response was "we weren't going to this year but you've just spoiled it!" 😂 

I like to think I've improved in the tact and diplomacy department since then. And reading the book made me realise some of the other skills I learned from my time at McDonald's which I perhaps hadn't consciously credited them for. As a leader, I've always focused on people, training and personal development because I reckon that's how you get the best results, and I learned a lot about business, operations, marketing, retail and a bunch of other things just by working there. And I learned the value of having fun at work. Without going into detail - Friday drinks, Christmas party, Store manager events, trips to the Sydney office and weekends with friends, paintball, horse-riding, Chevron Island, starting work at 7am and leaving at 2 to go to the MCG Members for day/night cricket, Donovans, canoeing up the Goulburn River from Mitchelton to Tahbilk, dressing up as Grimace, dressing up as the Village People (don't ask), and let's not forget donning an apron for "Back to Store Day" - I can rock a drive-thru headset with the best of them! 

So many good memories. Thanks McDonald's. One of the best times of my corporate life. ❤️

This was first published on LinkedIn.

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2022 Recap

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash 

The first thing to note is - the New Challenge was (a) successful and (b) completed. 

At the start of this year I set out to test myself. I lacked some confidence and was overly focussed on my perceived "gaps" in knowledge and what I'd missed. It took a very short amount of time to work out those thoughts were misguided. Others knew this too and I was rapidly promoted, twice, in a matter of months. 

In the last couple of months I embarked on a full application process for the vacant Head of IT role, which included screening more than 100 people over several rounds. I made it to the final two but ultimately lost out to another candidate who is currently a CIO. Given my application was realistic and not overly aspirational as I've done similar roles previously and run a business, I've chosen to move on to find a role at the right level for me. 

I’ve recently joined the Australian Institute of Company Directors and will undertake the Foundations of Directorship course in April, and I’m also planning to start an MBA in 2023. While I’ve run a business and also bought/sold a startup and I have a lot of experience, this is an opportunity for me to formalise some of that experience.

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A New Challenge - part 2

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash 

Today marks 2 months since I started my job so it's a good time to recap to see how things have measured up.

First up - the people I work with are 100% the nicest workplace of people I've ever been in. I can't even explain the multitude of ways they're the most pleasant and caring group of people. Even when there's a disconnect, no bad words are said. Complete strangers will check in just to see how I am. Our household came down with Covid recently which resulted in 2 weeks of chaos and it was no problem at all; people were proactively getting in touch to see how I was and discuss leave options because I hadn't been there long enough to have much. Amazing!

I've also discovered some things about myself and my capabilities in the last 2 months, which of course is part of the journey and part of this experiment.

1. I have a "GenX" mindset, which doesn't truly reflect workplaces today. I was totally focussed on hours and making sure I did more than that every single day, because that's what I'd always done, at least before I started my own business. But these days the expectation is to get the job done, whenever and wherever. It's been an adjustment.

2. I'm older than a lot of people I work with. I remember when I was 20-something, thinking people my age were ancient. Now I don't feel ancient at all, but I suspect some of them might think I am! Happily a benefit of being this age is it doesn't bother me in the slightest!

3. It took about 2 weeks to realise my confidence issue was unfounded. (Now I get to live with my husband's told-you-so-ish-ness but actually he was right). It's been really good for me to realise that not only haven't I lost any real skills, but running my own business and gaining a degree and raising kids means I've actually got even more than I used to.

4. Unfortunately, I'm not getting to use them all. I'm doing a role that is 2 levels below what I was last doing as an employee and… I'm already a bit bored. The hierarchy is not configured very well, the workflow and processes aren't well defined and it's quite a reactive environment. The problem is, I prefer proactive, and my previous experience means I can see what needs to be done but I'm not in a position to be able to do much about it.

On the one hand it's easy to say "just chill, ease back in, do your job and have plenty of time to do other things, get that work/life balance you've never really had". Sounds great! But on the other hand - yawn.

At some point I'm going to need to make a decision - either slow down into an easy work/life balance with really nice people, or accept boredom is just not me and never will be.

 

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A New Challenge

Photo by Peter Conlan on Unsplash

Last month was interesting. I got a job. 

I know this happens to a lot of people every day, but I've been self-employed for 15 years so for me it's kind of a big deal.

For the last few years I've been hearing that the corporate world is keen to recruit 45+ women with tech management backgrounds. I'm 45+ and I have a corporate tech management background. I also have a more recent business owner and business management background, and a current relevant degree. And now my kids are teens, my time is a bit more flexible. On paper it seems I'm exactly what they're looking for. I was interested!

It's not easy though.

LinkedIn is daunting if you haven't used it much. (An acquaintance who had to jobsearch for the first time in years after a Covid redundancy described it as "soul destroying" and they're not wrong.) I didn't really know what to call myself any more. When you run your own business you wear ALL the hats so there were about a dozen job titles I probably could have done pretty easily, but I didn't want to do just one thing when I had experience in many. Then there were bunches of job titles that didn't even exist last time I was a corporate employee. As a business owner and ex-IT Manager I could probably run somebody else's organisation or department without too much trouble, but I felt weighed down by the "15 years out of corporate" thing. It was hard to know where to pitch. I'm not a fan of LinkedIn but I waded in and spent some time looking around.

I saw a job that looked interesting so I updated my old CV and applied. No response. I saw another job and applied. Nothing for a couple of weeks, and then a recruiter got in touch. Her first words were "You're not right for this job but I don't know what you are, there's too much in your CV". Alrighty.

She suggested I do a "How to get the most out of LinkedIn" course so I did. I learned I should "personalise" LinkedIn, "diversify my options" and "post new content". I didn't understand this - what's the point of talking about my family and love of travel and sport and coffee and wine, and posting random quotes purely to "have content" on a professional networking platform? It's not Facebook. Nobody's going to hire me because I say I like coffee. Neverthless, I updated my CV.

I decided to address my qualifications. When you're self-employed you don't spend a lot of time/money picking up CV-stuffers. I had a bunch of certifications from years of multinational companies but they were out of date, and I had my degree. But this makes things challenging when you realise that recruitment today relies on algorithms and keywords in your CV before anybody ever considers actually talking to you. 

I signed up to get new project management qualifications. I figured even if I didn't want to be a full-time project manager again, it would be useful to refresh myself with modern techniques and processes and formalise what I already knew, and if nothing else I could use the new skills to finetune my own business processes. 

It was March 2020 and Covid-19 was taking hold. There was speculation if the course would go ahead and at the last minute they agreed it could as long as we all sat far apart and sprayed everything with disinfectant. On the last day I wandered down Collins Street with new shiny certifications in hand. The city was virtually empty. It reminded me of those old westerns with the big dust balls rolling down the main street. Totally surreal. The train was almost empty and people were looking furtively at anybody who got too close. It was nervewracking. The next day, Melbourne went into the first lockdown and that course didn't run again for months so I guess that was lucky.

Melbourne during lockdown - Michael J Fromholtz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My business helps small business with online. Lots of small business needed to suddenly get online or improve what they had. There were no corporate roles being listed. It was easy to keep doing what I'd been doing, so I did.

In 2021 there was an article in the Fin Review where the CEO of a large organisation was talking about a program to help get tech women back into corporate tech roles. I reached out and was surprised when the CEO replied personally and introduced me to HR. Eventually I received an email inviting me to fill out a form - to apply for a customer service role. I've never worked in a customer service role in my life. It didn't seem very "tech" or a very practical use of my skills. 

The experience was deflating. It was easier to keep doing what I'd been doing, so I did. But it was getting harder. Small business was either saving their money, or expecting the world for very little, and there was a lot of stress.

By the end of 2021 I was burnt out. The challenges of the pandemic on small business were overwhelming, including on my own. I decided to take January off and chill out, and think about what my next steps might be. 

I knew my biggest challenge - confidence. My husband has told me for years I'm underselling myself but I still had that mind niggle. This is weird and hard to explain because I run my own business and I'm confident when dealing with clients and suppliers and technical resources. I'm confident in my knowledge of technology and how best to apply and deliver it, and how best to communicate it. I'm confident that I know what I'm talking about because I've done this successfully for years, and others who do what I do sometimes ask for advice. I'm confident in all the skills and knowledge I built while studying for my degree, and volunteering in a global open source software project. I'm confident that when I used to work in global IT, I was pretty good at it.

But the thought of going back was somehow different. IT continually changes in ways a lot of other industries don't, and 15 years is a long time. I was quite anxious about what I no longer knew, and very conscious that both ageism and sexism were things even if nobody openly admitted it.

Even though I've been out of global IT specifically, my business is still in tech and I'll just go ahead and say it - tech is and always has been a bloke-fest. Most of the time I've loved working in tech and #MeToo has helped improve some things, but the exceptions really stand out. I'm not sure of the percentages in 2022, but in the 2000s women made up less than 10% of the IT industry. Logically, this can't possibly be due to lack of ability. Logically also, some of that 10% are the ones industry are now keen to re-recruit. 

Even though logically you KNOW nobody can possibly know all of it, part of you subconsciously thinks you don't know enough. Part of you believes that being out means you've lost some of what you had, even if you almost certainly haven't. My brother tells me it's called imposter syndrome and it's really common.

At 45+ after a gap, it can be confronting to put yourself out there in an environment like LinkedIn, to deal with recruiters who are often younger and don't necessarily understand your particular demographic. It's not obvious that all recruiters understand that women do CVs differently to men, or that hiring gender bias is a thing, particularly in STEM. Then if you actually get through to an interview for a tech role, you'll almost certainly face an all-male panel, many of whom are younger than you (but more "recent"). It's tough.

If there's one positive to take out of the global pandemic, it's the successful introduction of remote and hybrid workplaces. One of the main reasons I left corporate IT and started my own business was flexibility. Things were relatively simple to manage before I had a family, and after that much harder. IT was server-room and office-based and required a lot of hours outside of normal business hours. It was not geared to working mothers. Childcare only covered business hours, my husband also worked long hours and we had no family close by who could help. I got the hours done but I was exhausted, and one day I was offered a promotion which meant more hours and I had to make a choice. 

Now, everyone knows how to Zoom and it's acceptable and productive to meet and work that way. Flexibility is one reason I decided to take another look at my old career. Even though we don't need to juggle childcare any more, teenagers have different needs and flexibility means we can both juggle that a lot better than we once could.

In February I asked a couple of people for help with my CV. We took out the coffee nonsense and updated the lingo to 2022-corporate-ese. Turns out I had plenty of experience but not the right words to trigger the algorithms, and I'd left out some stuff I didn't think was as important as it actually was. 

The next 3 jobs I applied for, I got 3 interviews almost immediately. That helped enormously with confidence. And here I am with a new job.

I'm approaching this whole experience with an open mind, as I've always tried to approach new situations. I know it will be challenging. I've been able to set my own hours for years now and fit in family, a degree and volunteering as well, so I'm pretty good at multitasking and getting things done. But part of my brain still remembers how physically and mentally hard being a full-time IT employee was before I left, and I've had to talk myself out of some genuine deep-seated apprehension about giving up my fully flexible life.

The main reason I want to give this another go is to test myself - find out what I can do and know, see how much is new and what hasn't changed at all, work out how to apply everything I've learnt running my own business in new ways, build some confidence, gain perspective, and boost my super up a bit. I don't want to hit retirement and wonder "what if?" or as a friend said "die wondering". If the list of pros/cons leans positive, great. If not, that's fine too. Wish me luck. 😁

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