“You can’t be what you can’t see”
A deeply rewarding and enjoyable volunteering experience with GCSE students at Fred Longworth High School
When I first heard that my work was supporting the Salford Foundation, a charity that aims to inspire and support young people’s personal development and growth, I immediately wanted to see how I could get involved.
I’m Avik, a Senior User Research Consultant at Capgemini Invent. My job involves planning, designing and carrying out research to gain a deeper understanding of users and their behaviours when using services or digital products. My research outputs inform policy, proposition, content and design so that service users have a positive experience when using them. I love what I do, and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to talk to and meet such diverse groups of people whilst doing my job. It’s especially gratifying to give a voice to under-represented groups of people and ensure their needs are also being met.
Funnily enough, I never wanted to be a user researcher growing up, mainly because I never knew it existed as a career. How can you pursue something you’re not aware of? This is partly due to it being a relatively new career field that my parents and those around me were not aware of when I was growing up. But research has existed as a profession for hundreds of years.
After completing a degree in robotics engineering due only to my love of Lego and this being the closest thing I could see myself enjoying to study I realised I wanted a career that was more people-facing. After a long 5 years of figuring out what I wanted to do, I can finally say I am the happiest I’ve been in a while and for the first time see a future career path ahead of me.
However, if I had spoken to someone in my field of work when I was younger, could I have gotten to this point sooner?
The World of Work
On the 24th of March, I attended the World of Work event at Fred Longworth Highschool where I spoke to 35 GCSE students throughout the day, in groups of 5 or 6. This allowed us to have more of a discussion and helped me get to know their individual likes and dislikes better.
I was curious how I would keep the student’s attention and thankfully my colleague Jess, gave me some great advice on how to prepare and approach the day based on her own experience a few weeks before. She suggested I bring something to keep them engaged like a prop to keep their attention and in true consulting form I opted for a slideshow presentation.
I decided on the following structure for my presentation:
- Intro about my role and the company
- Elon Musk — what do they think about this eccentric billionaire?
- My career journey so far — a timeline
- What is a user researcher?
- Round the room — share your favourite app or website
- Case study — Netflix’s auto-play feature
- Q&A
We only had about 20 minutes per group and the time went very quickly but thankfully Jess’s tip on bringing topical and relatable subjects to the group kept them all very engaged no matter their disposition. It was interesting to note the difference in app usage between my generation and theirs. The most popular apps were Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram and how they used them was also very different to my peers. The appeal of short-form content such as stories, and reels and being able to track your friend’s locations were the key themes.
The day itself went by incredibly quickly and I enjoyed stepping out of my comfort zone and speaking to students with interesting and challenging questions. Despite their generation’s access to the internet and the wide range of jobs out there, one thing that hadn’t changed was the jobs they were interested in were all based on what they were exposed to by people around them, just like it was for me. One boy stated he wanted to be a painter and when I asked why he said because his dad is a painter. I probed further to uncover what type of painter he was, which lead to the boy confidently stating, “he’s not one of those painters, you know…like Pablo Escobar”. This drew a few sniggers from some of his peers, which he coolly played off. But when we determined that his dad was a painter-decorator it seemed the only reason he wanted to become one too was because that was the job he had the most experience of seeing.
Interestingly, he didn’t seem that excited by it.
This made me see parallels between myself and my decision to choose Engineering despite knowing very little about it and brings me to the title of this piece:
“You can’t be what you can’t see”.
Maybe none of the students I spoke to will choose a career in user research but hopefully, they will now be informed a little better about the variety of jobs out there and use their access to vast amounts of information to find something they are passionate about and, in the end, is something they look forward to doing when they wake up each morning.
After all, we spend most of our life at work, so why not enjoy it?
