Careers on and off the record

What a Madonna album launch and the Women in PR Invisible Workforce campaign taught me about how communications reads careers for capacity, not capability.

Two launches took place on opposite sides of London on the same evening in early July. One marked the release of Madonna's latest record, Confessions II. The other was the launch of Women in PR's Invisible Workforce campaign, examining what happens when people try to sustain careers in communications alongside caring responsibilities. I happened to be involved in both. I only attended the louder of the two, so it took me several days to realise they were asking much the same question.

What It Feels Like for a Girl

The findings describe an industry whose expectations often collide with the realities of adult life. Female caregivers reported working an average of 91 hours a week once paid work, unpaid overtime and caring responsibilities were combined. Most striking was that 76 per cent had hidden or downplayed their caring responsibilities, while 70 per cent of PR professionals had no idea how many of their own colleagues were carers. Together, those findings describe an industry that becomes progressively harder to remain visible inside once life stops behaving predictably.

The research does not suggest that caring creates better practitioners or that flexibility resolves the structural pressures many people experience. It simply reveals how professional visibility can diminish while capability remains much harder to judge. I now wonder how many experienced people quietly come to mistake one for the other.

The research focuses on women, because unpaid care continues to fall disproportionately on them. Even so, much of what it describes felt immediately familiar.

Live to Tell

My wife died in 2012, when our son was two. Several years later he was diagnosed as autistic, and as he moved into adolescence our life together became shaped by school refusal, safeguarding concerns, CAMHS appointments and calls that could arrive at any hour. People often describe situations like this as needing flexibility. What I actually needed was harder to arrange than that: flexible working can usually be planned whereas unpredictability cannot.

Senior agency leadership depends on other people being able to rely on you. Clients need decisions, teams need consistency, and junior colleagues need guidance close at hand. There came a point when I no longer believed I could honestly promise that kind of certainty, and it cost me two roles I had worked hard to reach. The first was shortly after becoming MD at Mischief, a position I stepped away from after my wife died. The second, some years later, was a deeper role at The Unmistakables, which I withdrew from once my son's diagnosis made it impossible to promise the level of availability the role deserved.

It wasn't my ambition that changed. It was my capacity to offer other people certainty. For a long time I read that as the end of my agency career. Nobody told me so directly – it was simply the explanation that fit the visible evidence. A career interruption leaves a record. Capability doesn't.

Nobody Knows Me

Recruitment inevitably relies on signals that are easy to assess. Continuous employment, recent experience, senior job titles and visible availability all reduce uncertainty. They also provide only a partial account of somebody's future professional value. One UK field experiment found that CVs highlighting years of experience rather than employment dates attracted around 15 per cent more interview invitations than CVs that made career interruptions obvious, even though the applicants themselves had not changed. Research into cognitive ageing tells a similarly uneven story. Processing speed and some forms of fluid reasoning may decline with age, while accumulated knowledge and crystallised intelligence often remain durable, and creativity follows no single curve across a working life.

I have come to think of it as three separate questions that careers tend to fold into one. The first, whether someone is still capable of valuable work, The second, how much of that work they can realistically sustain, given the rest of their life. And the third, whether the structure they have always worked within still fits the life they are now living. My capability had not disappeared during those years. It was my capacity that changed, and thereafter my compatibility with a particular model of agency leadership.

For years I answered all three questions with the same conclusion because they felt inseparable. They were not. Losing compatibility with one way of working had gradually convinced me I had lost my capability altogether. Looking back, I had become the recruiter reading my own career, giving greatest weight to the most interrupted chapter and much less to everything that had accumulated before it. Untangling those three took a long time, because most careers only give you one timeline to read them against.

Don’t Tell Me

Hearing Madonna's new record, I realised I had spent years judging my own career in much the same way people often judge hers. Public discussion of later careers tends to measure the present against an earlier peak, asking what age and time have taken away. Listening to it, I found myself more interested in what decades of practice might have added: sharper editorial judgement, a clearer sense of identity, a surer instinct for what to leave out. None of that guarantees good work, and later careers bring their own constraints alongside whatever they gain, but it is a different question from the one the industry usually asks.

Like many experienced practitioners, I eventually found a different way of working. Lucky Start gave me a structure that better matched the life I was living than the one I had built my career around. It has not been an uncomplicated improvement. Independence brings its own insecurity and its own costs.

The communications industry has become skilled at recognising visible momentum: promotions, unbroken employment, and expanding responsibility. Those are meaningful indicators, but they are also incomplete ones. An industry that increasingly depends on judgement and discernment may need a fuller way of reading careers whose chronology has stopped looking tidy. For a while I mistook the end of one way of working for the end of my useful working life. Something much narrower had happened. The employment model I had built my career within no longer fitted the life I was living, and my capability had survived the change.