I have had a few career changes, but changing from the career you spent 4 years getting a degree in is a big step. Especially if you only qualified 3 years earlier! 

I loved Radiation Therapy. I really felt I was making a difference, and building a rapport with patients came naturally to me. Maybe too naturally. My ability to empathise was causing me to get quite upset about some patients’ situations or outcomes. The teenager who had just been accepted into the school of dance, who did not yet know that the treatment for her very curable brain tumour would mean she never danced at that elite level again. The young mum who held her teddy bear as we treated her for 3 weeks in the hope that she would respond and go back to her normal self. She didn’t. The nun who shared her story with a nervous patient suffering the same type of cancer. The children. Oh my, the children. Brave or scared, happy or upset. The children broke my heart. 

You may have realised from that little outpouring that I was not able to maintain the emotional distance that would give that career path longevity! 

But what next?  Psychology?  Or would I just get too involved with a different type of patient? IT maybe? But did I really want to go back and get another degree?  

Then fate stepped in. I moved to the UK and signed up with an agency that provided radiation therapists to London hospitals (I can’t recall the name of the agency – but my payslips had owls on them!). In my first meeting they were most apologetic – they had a job but it was not in a hospital. It was user acceptance testing radiation therapy software in a company outside of London. But it paid an extra 2 pounds per hour to cover the travel! I will be honest – I didn’t know software testing was even a thing people did. But I signed up. 16 pounds per hour was not to be sneezed at!

Turns out I loved software testing. The attention to detail, the fact that a dead computer did not cause me to cry, the people I worked with were great, and I worked in an office, without wearing a uniform! 

I stayed as a temp at this company for about 2 years. There was a brief stint in a London hospital between software releases, but working on the treatment machine that treated all the children just reinforced my need to change careers. I moved from UAT testing to system testing as my experience grew. And that is when the two developers I worked with started nagging. ‘Go contracting’ they’d say. ‘I have no qualifications’ I would argue. Back and forth for weeks. They upped the ante by leaving ‘IT contractor’ magazine open on my desk with testing jobs circled and the hourly rate highlighted. Often. And eventually I decided there was no harm in applying. The worst was they would not hire me and I would remain where I was.

So, I applied for 3 jobs. And had three job offers (thank you Y2K!). At double my temp hourly rate. 

In mid-1999 I began what ended up being a 15-year career as a contract tester/ test manager. 

Thank you, Toby and Greg!