Healthcare Marketing Manager
The Hub, Bristol

Clare D

00:00:02 My name’s Clare D and I’m a health care product marketing manager.  I didn’t really enjoy school, I just kind of got on with it.  I learnt that it was better to just keep your head down then you were pretty much left alone.  Our careers advisor was part time, he was also the technical drawing teacher.  He and I sat down for a chat and he opened up his book and he showed me the traditional kind of, you know, nursery nursing, insurance, banking, hairdressing.  So I asked him something I didn’t think he’d be able to produce.  I asked him I could be a train driver and told him that was my ambition.  I think he was delighted, actually, because he used to work at British Aerospace I found out later.  He worked there for 12 years and he got in touch with his former employers and said, “I’ve got a possible student here for you, can you take her for work experience?”  I came away thinking, “This was the best thing ever,” and that this was what I wanted to do so, I decided that was going to be my future.  No more college or A Levels or the traditional route, I was going to be an engineer.  I was going to go and work for British Aerospace.

00:01:08 After work experience I decided that ok, this was going to be, I wanted to learn to be an apprentice.  I wanted to apply for that apprenticeship position and I ended up being awarded a mechanical apprenticeship position which was a four year kind of traineeship under the various engineering departments at British Aerospace, and whilst I was going around these different departments, I found out that actually the role that people who were following my education programme were doing wasn’t one that I actually wanted to finish up with.  There was another level, a higher level which had slightly more interesting tasks and slightly more responsibility. So to do that I needed to go to university and I knew I could do that, so I decided to apply myself and got accepted to university to study a degree in mechanical engineering.

00:02:57 My ambition was to become a chartered engineer.  This was what had been sold would be the kind of ultimate aim for anybody who takes an engineering degree is you have to, you know, study and become a chartered engineer and that’s you, a professional.  So, it took me eight years of doing various engineering jobs and around about the same time as I got awarded my chartered engineer, something, you know, always something different happens.  The oil price dropped through the floor to about $10 a barrel and at this time I was working in an oil and gas sector and all the projects stopped dead.  All the money was put on hold, there was nothing for anybody to do, we were just going around sort of filing and, you know, drawing up fancy plans on paper that were never going to happen and I thought, “This is nonsense, I don’t want to do this anymore.” 

00:02:45 So, I’d been talking to some friends and they had studied an MBA and they suggested that probably I would enjoy the same course so that was my decision to leave work and I applied for and got accepted on an MBA business course in London.  One of my professors recommended me to one of her industrial partners to say that he was looking for somebody to fill a particular role in a new group he’d taken over and I thought, “Ok, I’m going to try this,” and it was a total change in direction.  I ended up working as the assistant to the Vice President of Marketing for a medical device company.  So, that was the start of my health care marketing journey and that’s what I’m doing now and what I intend to keep doing.

00:03:28 I have an ambition that says I really, really want to understand how this works and I really, really want to understand, you know, and be the one bringing all this together and making it all kind of happen.  So, if that’s ambition then I’ve got ambition.  I call it curiosity and passion.  I didn’t have great work life balance for a number of years and I paid the price.  I had work burn out and I had to take time off from work and really just sort of sit back and re-evaluate what I was doing, where I was going and I think I’m more aware now that in order for you to be, or in order for me to be successful and to really enjoy what I’m doing in my work, then I have to have a really satisfying life outside of work.  I have to have good friends, I have to have hobbies that I enjoy and people in my life who I care about and who care about me.  So, I’ve learnt to try different things and it’s amazing where your inspiration and your ideas for what you want to do next come from.

ENDS