What’s for you won’t go by you

Other posts in this series have looked at the structural side of dRTP careers – Vicki Yorke-Edwards and colleagues examined whether job descriptions actually reflect the work dRTPs do, and Jeremy Cohen and Isabella von Holstein mapped out the training pathways into the profession. This blog by Martin Donnelly takes a different approach: rather than looking at the landscape, it reflects back on one particular path through it…

Readers, A confession:

I did not set out to become a data steward. I joined two webinars recently about Research Data Stewardship and Open Science careers, as part of the London Open Science and Scholarship Festival, which led me to reflect on my own path. The honest version of that reflection can be uncomfortable – that chance plays a far more powerful role in career success than we usually allow ourselves to admit – but we can, and I think should, look at this in a more positive way.

People love stories that insist career success is purely a product of hard work and planning. Preparation, networking, upskilling. These are things we can control, and control – or the illusion of control – is comforting. But the truth I’ve learned from looking backward is that the perfect position often appears through unexpected channels: a conversation at a conference, a friend-of-a-friend’s recommendation, or – as in my case more than once – stumbling upon a job posting on the day it goes live because someone mentioned it in conversation or on social media. That doesn’t diminish the importance of preparation – you still need to be able to rise to the occasion when opportunity knocks – but it does highlight why staying curious and open matters more than we sometimes acknowledge.

My first degree was in English Literature. Accepted wisdom at the time was that there were only a handful of obvious career paths to follow: journalism, teaching, or further study. I considered all three, and decided: no thanks. So I drifted for a year, working in temporary jobs – I could afford a flat, CDs, takeaways and nights out. A few months of that life taught me I didn’t want to spend the rest of it in a BT call centre, so I took what was called a “conversion course” Masters’ in IT – a taught postgraduate qualification for non-computing graduates – mainly to add a futuristic string to my old-fashioned bow. (I was fortunate that, at the time, the Scottish Government covered the fees for many IT qualifications, in a bid to upskill and modernise the workforce. Had they not, my life and career would probably have been very different.)

The term conversion course always irritated me, implying as it did some sort of turning-away from my Arts and Humanities background. In truth, I had been interested in computers since my first experience with a BBC Micro in the early 1980s, and I was in the first cohort of pupils in my school able to study Computing – mostly dorks, myself included. So computing was a persistent thread through my personal and scholarly lives, even if I didn’t always shout about it.

When I graduated from the Masters’, a job opened up at the department where I’d taken a Humanities computing paper as an undergraduate. I wasn’t exactly top of the class, but the first-choice person wasn’t interested, so I interviewed… and although I didn’t know it at the time, that was where my career was to begin.

That job was in cultural heritage – a two-year contract analysing the potential uses of new technologies for what became known as the GLAM sector: Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums – sponsored by the European Commission. I learned a lot about emerging technologies, some of which are now standard, some still niche, and some of which vanished without trace. Among the projects I keyed into was digital preservation: awareness of the fragility of born-digital content was just beginning to surface at that time.

I liked the academic environment, so I stayed in the university world on fixed-term contracts for a number of years – and that was fine until it wasn’t. Life happens. I fell in love, moved city, got married and wanted to buy a house. So I decided it was time to grow up professionally and got a proper job in a suit. I managed that for just over two years – sometimes a change is as good as a rest – but the environment wasn’t for me, and I started looking for a way back into the university realm.

My first permanent contract was at the Digital Curation Centre, just as the field was evolving from digital preservation toward research data management. I spent a solid decade there, watching the discipline mature and growing up myself in parallel. I didn’t plan to become an expert in research data management – the field barely existed when I started. But I said yes to projects that seemed tangential at the time. I attended conferences where I knew nobody. I shared half-formed work publicly and got useful criticism. These weren’t strategic career moves; they were responses to immediate opportunities and curiosity. But they accumulated into expertise and networks I couldn’t have assembled deliberately.

When you take a random workshop, attend an industry event out of obligation, or help a stranger with advice, you are creating more opportunities for serendipity to strike, expanding your radius for fortunate accidents.

By the mid-2010s I’d decided to go in-house and do similar work at a university rather than on the national and international stage. Partly this was about wanting more stability and less travel – it turns out babies also happen, and they take a lot of looking after. Then 2020 happened. Voluntary redundancy and Covid arrived more or less simultaneously. Not ideal timing. But here’s the thing about luck and timing: sometimes what looks like terrible timing opens doors that would otherwise have stayed shut. Covid normalised remote working practically overnight. I took a job at a publisher –interesting work and great experience, but again not for the long term. It kept me employed and learning while the world began to heal.

All of which brings me to UCL. A job I never thought I’d be in a position to take, working on a hybrid basis with a great team and a good work-life balance. It came about through a combination of factors: a previous contact I kept up with on LinkedIn, the post-Covid expansion of home-working enabling people to work hundreds of miles from where they live, plus the messy, interdisciplinary background I’d accumulated by accident. None of this was in a five-year plan.

So what’s the takeaway?

I’m not suggesting you give up planning or stop building your skills – preparation definitely matters. But pay attention to the accidents and the failures too. Learn from them. Say yes to introductions even when you’re not sure why. Pursue projects that genuinely interest you even if they seem tangential. Share your work publicly even when it feels half-finished. Help people even when there’s no obvious benefit to you. Such actions put you in fortune’s way.

As Mary Schmich wrote in 1997, “Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or celebrate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.” Your dream job – if such a thing exists – might not come from a carefully executed career strategy. It might come from a Thursday afternoon conversation you almost skipped. It might come from saying yes to something that seemed irrelevant at the time. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, as the saying goes, but you have to let opportunity find you first. And opportunity tends to find people who are curious, generous, attentive.

“What’s for you won’t go by you”

That’s what Scottish grannies used to say, usually to people worrying about things beyond their control. It sounds fatalistic, but it’s not about passivity. It’s about doing the work, staying open, and trusting that if you’re in likely places at likely times with the right attitude, fortune will find you. Keep showing up, keep learning, keep helping, and see what happens. It’s worked for me so far anyway.

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