Coffee with Caroline Artis
Caroline Artis
Partner EY
Age 50
Coffee at 1 More London Riverside, SE1
Describe your career path in two or three sentences including any twist or turns ending with where you are now and where you see yourself in the future.
Superficially, I've only ever worked for two organisations in 30 years which seems a little lacking in ambition! However, within those two organisations, I have had a huge variety of roles. In no particular order, I've been a tax accountant doing basic corporate tax returns and things, I had a relatively long spell in a training team where I was responsible for pushing training out to everybody from graduate joiners all the way up to partners. I also did a year in Tokyo running the UK tax advice desk.
More recently at EY, I’ve been a client handling tax partner, I've been our market leader running teams of partners looking after clients in London and in the North. Currently, I’m on the UK Leadership Team reporting to the UK board, I sit on Remco, the EY remuneration committee and I have a responsibility for five large PLCs with approximately $400 million in turnover and as Office Managing Partner, I oversee approximately 6,000 people in this building. That’s not two sentences that’s a lot of sentences. But as I say on the face of it, two jobs, ten years at PW and 20 years at EY.
Underneath, those two headlines, a multitude of different roles with many twists and turns all of which has brought me to where I am today. Some decisions were very fortuitous, others more focused. However, I would not say there was a great master plan from day one to today.
What decision / experience proved to be the most helpful to your career?
I think there are probably two and one led to the other. First, was a desire to do a spell overseas. In the 90s, I was offered a role in Australia which I was very keen on taking. Then about two, three weeks before I was due to go, I was called in and asked if I would go to Tokyo instead. I had no wish to go to Tokyo. I had no connection with Tokyo and I knew no Japanese. All I could see was it would be difficult to go as a single female on my own but I went anyway. And it was a fantastic experience and I more or less loved every minute of it.
What was then incredible, was a year or so later when I was looking to leave PW and come to EY, I faced a lot of questioning about my personal ability to deal with change, to be adaptable, to be able to embrace new situations etc and the Tokyo / Japan story was pretty much the answer to every question and was definitely a better answer than the Australian job would have been which I think would've been seen as a relatively easy role.
I think the enthusiasm with which I was offered a place here based on the storytelling of that year in Japan meant that the last-minute decision to go to Japan rather than Australia proved a proper blessing in disguise. The lesson to me is when you are offered something, even if it is not what you think you want, just say yes and give it a go.
What do you think are the most important qualities are for sustaining a fulfilling career(s)?
Pace and not thinking that you have got to achieve everything in the first five years of your career. There is a pace to most peoples’ careers which enables you to accelerate at points which suit the balance of the rest of your life and possibly be a little bit less ambitious at other points, depending on what’s going on in your life.
With pace comes balance and if you want to sustain a career without it taking its toll emotionally and psychologically, you need to find the right balance between your work and personal life. If you are never present at anything in your personal life, then work will never feel like something that you are lucky to do.
And if you are never present at work, then you may feel that the rest of your life it is restricting your ability to do well at your job. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon, it’s a really long marathon and where you might be at 21, 22 and compared to where you might be at 54, 55 can be very different. I don't know many people who have it perfectly right; most people just keep exploring.
What advice would you give your 20 year old self knowing what you know now?
Don’t be a teacher unless you are really passionate about teaching! I thought I wanted to be a teacher so after I finished university, I went to teachers’ training and did a post-grad for a year. At the end of that year, I was offered a job and I sat across the table with the head, with no idea of what else I was going to do and quite bravely said, ‘I don't think so, I just don’t think I am as committed as you need to be to make this work’. Then, I kind of spiraled into a panic, the second I stepped away thinking, oh my god you have spent five years thinking you wanted to be a teacher and you have just turned down a teaching job! But it was all fine.
The lesson for me is not discount your ability to make other decisions, to change your mind and take a different path that will lead you to exactly the right role for you, at exactly the right point in your life. Never undersell you’re worth and never undersell your abilities. So I think my advice would be, don't be afraid of turning things down but equally, don't be afraid of accepting things. It seems ludicrous but actually, you can be trapped in a job that you never really wanted for a very long time just because you didn’t feel brave enough to turn it down.
What are the biggest challenges for people wanting to make a career re-entry or re-invention later in life?
The days of people stopping work at 55 are rapidly disappearing. With the decline in manual labour, improved health and the ability to continue to work later in life there is an opportunity for people to work in their 50s, 60s maybe even 70s if they want to.
I read something yesterday that said in 2018, for the first time in history, persons aged 65 or above outnumbered children under the age of five globally and so the whole demographic of the planet is tilting, the population is getting bigger and older. So, employers will absolutely have to start thinking about hiring older people, there won't be enough 21 year olds to go around.
And do you think corporations are thinking about this?
Yes, definitely. Interestingly, It is probably one of the few areas where women have a bit of an edge over men. I think there is a greater understanding and appreciation for women who stepped back from certain roles or stepped away from work completely to either have children or other caring responsibilities and then later, as the caring responsibilities lessened, try to step back in.
Today, we have more onboarding programmes aimed at bringing women back into the firm whether they trained with us or not, after a 10, 15, sometimes even 20 year gap in employment on the basis that if someone was smart then, they are probably still smart now. The skillset of a woman who has been multitasking is probably easier to adapt and use than the skill set of a man who has just been doing just one thing.
What are the opportunities are for people hoping to work into their 50s, 60s and beyond?
The barrier to labour in the past was mainly physical; an inability to stand on your feet and work a machine for eight hours a day or carry heavy loads from A to B but thanks to technology, the vast majority of labour work today is sedentary. If you look at what machines do really well and what people do we really badly, it is long repetitive tasks, like adding up numbers or proofreading big documents where people are likely to make mistakes and machines are not.
What people do really well and machines do badly, is innovative thinking, collaborative conversations, relationship building — essentially, things that require a human connection that machines can't do that and are unlikely to do in the future. These are things that women do phenomenally well at and men aren’t that good at. Well, some are, it’s a bit sexist to say none of them are. But more women are good at collaborative, entrepreneurial, thoughtful team leadership than a similar cross-section of men. And because that is the way that the workforce will need to develop, we will want people to do things that AI and robotics can not do better or faster.
Funnily enough, it really ought to level the playing field between the sexes, especially for women in their 50s with great collaborative experience. And these women will be as good, if not better than someone in their 20s. It will be their attributes, their emotional intelligence and their social skills that will stand them above the others.
KB: Sounds hopeful.
CA: You can only take what you can see and try and cast it forward. The workplace has already changed but it will continue to evolve and the demographics, just the pure demographics of it mean that older individuals with collaborative skills will be needed. There won’t be enough 21-year-old, older workers will be needed. It won't be a matter of choice, I think it will be a matter of necessity.
What is your top tip for staying relevant in today’s job market?
I think it is to remain open-minded about the way things change; never be that person who says ‘Oh, it was better in the old days’; never be, ‘Oh we tried it and it didn’t work’, never be the person that says ‘Everything today is rubbish and everything in the past was brilliant’.
Be the person who attempts to stay relevant to the issues of the moment, some of which may involve trying something you tried before and didn't work then but just might now because technology is better. If you are open-minded to all of those things, then you will just be relevant.
Recommendation: Favourite book to read, website to browse or podcast to listen to while drinking coffee?
I have an eclectic range of stuff that I listen to everything from the Archers podcast through to High Low, which is a podcast by Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton, talking about stuff aimed at young people that I literally know nothing about but I listen to it on the basis that I ought to have a couple of reference points to what people are talking about!
My inspiration about the art of the possible comes from everybody I come across, from friends and family to work colleagues and clients and the little bit of things that they tell me in conversation, whether it is about recovering from a personal catastrophe or fighting through an illness or dealing with a challenge that would floor someone else. I just look at people and think you have battled the odds and come back fighting; you may not have written a book about it but I still think it is amazing that you have done that!
I don’t spend too much time reading self-help books. Sometimes, seemingly silly books and children’s books like the Matthew Syed’s book “You Are Awesome” can teach you things about believing in yourself and about how it’s not about your cleverness per se but how hard are you work to achieve the best you can within the confines of what you are capable of.
You should never worry about your ability to keep up with everybody on every level, in any group there will be things that some people are good at and some people are not so good at but there is a whole bunch of stuff that is not necessarily always visible, everyone comes with their own strengths and weaknesses. The challenge is we often compare our weaknesses with everybody else's strengths and discount our own strengths as irrelevant.