‘I quit university after a year – and earned £85k in a successful IT career’
In a new series, Telegraph Money speaks to those who have found success without earning a degree.
As a teen in the 1970s, Mark Turner felt pressured to become the first in his family to go to university.
He didn’t do particularly well in his A-Levels, but still got a place to study electrical engineering at a polytechnic.
The course also covered computing and programming, which struck a chord with Mr Turner – who later dropped out after the first year and got a job instead.
Since then, he has gone on to work in senior IT roles at large companies such as Vodafone, where he earned a comfortable salary of more than £85,000, before retiring this year.
“I wish I’d have not bothered with a degree and gone straight into that walk of life,” he says. “I just felt that that pressure was relentless, to be honest, to go and do a degree. I just didn’t look at alternatives. I don’t blame anybody, but I lost a year.”
Mr Turner, now 64, got his first job as a computer operator at the University of Oxford, where he was able to get a Higher National Certificate on day release while he was there, which kept his father happy.
Others in the office were coming in straight from doing A-Levels, so he did not feel out of place.
Mr Turner, from Standlake in Oxfordshire, started out as a trainee and moved up to a shift leader role within a few years.
At the time, computers were enormous and needed to be manned all the time. The role helped him understand how computers and hardware work – knowledge he built on when microcomputers came on to the scene and technologies changed.
“I’d certainly encourage people to get into computing at the lower levels, like I did when I started, because it gives you a very good grounding and probably makes you much more transportable,” he says.
He says he switched jobs often in the early days of his career.
“I wasn’t anywhere for more than two or three years,” he says. “I moved to London for a more prestigious job at Marks & Spencer. That wasn’t doing operations: I was starting to do programming and that sort of thing.” Mr Turner was learning “job control language” – a language enabling the user to define the tasks to be undertaken by the operating system.
He moved on from mainframe computers to networks and network management, ending up in the telecoms industry. The bulk of his later working life was spent at Cable and Wireless, BT and Vodafone.
He finished his career as an agile delivery manager at Vodafone, doing his own coding again. The work entailed managing projects in small intimate teams.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s companies favoured “waterfall” project management, which is a linear system that requires teams to complete each project phase before moving to the next one. These days, agile management has become more common as it encourages smaller teams – in Mr Turner’s case, around 10 to 12 people – to work simultaneously on different phases of the project.
“If you look at some of the huge programmes run by the Government at that time, they were spectacular in their failure and achieved very little,” he says. “[Agile management] is just a more modern way of managing activities.”
For a long time coding was off-shored, but Mr Turner says he is now seeing a new generation that wants to get into the mechanics of it.
Throughout his career, adapting to change technologies and processes has been key. “Working for commercial companies, they recognise that they have to adapt to customer needs,” he says. “That does mean you have to be on the ball in terms of the latest methodologies and latest ways of working. Embracing that is the main thing. There will always be the great big projects that take years and years, but they’re becoming less the norm.”
Mr Turner says it’s better to “fail fast” – give up on things that don’t work and move on with those that do. “The more successful people are the ones that will adopt that approach,” he says.
He also says his ability to embrace non-hierarchical ways of working has helped him thrive. “You have to be prepared to work as a flat team, which comes hard to some people who’ve been used to directing work as opposed to participating in it. A key factor is to participate, not direct.”
“You have to listen a lot. Look at what people are doing,” he continues. “The phrase is sometimes ‘critical friend’ – you have to be that. You have to be prepared to take that criticism as well.”
Mr Turner has run and worked in teams with mixed ages throughout his life, which has kept him nimble. His biggest challenge has been dealing with “over-expectations” and plans which are “quite frankly unfeasible”.
“It’s sometimes having the bravery to say no – that’s a big thing,” he says. “Certainly, when I interview people to be project managers, one of my first questions is how projects are very good at coming up with plans and forecasts, but how do you handle bad news? How are you going to say when things are going wrong?
“Because in all honesty, that’s going to be your biggest challenge: being brave enough to say that something’s going wrong and being brave enough to do something about it and not just coast along. In many corporate environments bad news doesn’t go down well.”
When you’re young, keen and out to prove yourself, this can be harder to do.
He often says his bosses have praised him for being honest and saying things “as they are”, but some people do find it difficult. A manager who hears that something is going wrong can see it as a reflection on them, but in this case it’s best to focus on the solution.
“You’re not dwelling on the problem but dwelling on the route out,” he says. “There’s a lot of pressure to react immediately, but just having the discipline to say ‘No, I see a problem. Let me look at it for a day and I’ll come back to you with a reasonable way forward.’”
In his 13 years at Vodafone, he saw a shift towards more young people joining without degrees. When he started there was only a graduate programme which hired people to do project management-type jobs. By the time he left, they had as many apprentices as graduates. Often graduates now are coming in to do more junior roles, happy to be getting a foot in the door.
Have you found success without a degree? We’d love to hear from you. Email money@telegraph.co.uk
