Together with her business partner Sarah Ellis, she is the author of two Sunday Times bestsellers, The Squiggly Career and You Coach You. Sarah and Helen are also hosts of the podcast Squiggly Careers, which has had 4m downloads and their TED talk, The best career isn’t always a straight line, has been watched by almost 2m people.
In 2023 Helen was awarded a place on EYs International Winning Women programme. Prior to Amazing If, Helen held leadership roles for Microsoft, Virgin and BP and was awarded the FT & 30% Club’s Women in Leadership MBA Scholarship.
Highlights
A squiggly career is the opposite of the ladder-like career. It's about saying how do we give people the freedom and flexibility to develop in a direction that is right for them.
Everyone doesn’t always want to go up the ladder, they might want to develop in a different direction.
This is not likely to be linear and predictable, there’s going to be lots of change and that doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong.
The drive to democratise career development was a very big desire from the outset from us really.
If you help people in their career, you help them in their life.
Work is such an important part of people's life and if there’s a way that we can help people feel a bit more in control of what they’re doing at work, a bit more confident about where they’re going at work then I think that that has a really big impact on all the other things that they do with their time as well.
If you don’t invest in your squiggly career, you are much more likely to get left behind.
We’re not thinking about titles, we’re thinking about talents.
I think I’m very good at creating clarity for people.