So, I am 51 and am a Director of Revenue Operations for a software company. What does that mean - still not entirely sure after 20 odd years of working in that area.
I grew up on a family farm and it was always assumed (as with most farm boys) that I would follow my dad into the family business. I never really wanted to as a kid as I saw all of my mates planning for Uni and what I perceived to be glamorous careers. I somehow ended up doing a degree in International Business whcih allowed me to spend 2 years in France - 1 year at Uni in Bordeaux and 1 year working for a logistics company in Paris. After graduating, I only had one thing in mind - that I would never work in delivery and logistics again. The realities were however that the only grad scheme I could get accepted onto was DHL's - so I took a place just to get me going. I worked all over the world in the next 10 years and had a marvellous time. My last project was introducing a CRM tool. After accepting redundancy I took a role at Cisco, rolling out Salesforce - I didn't realise at the time that this would set the path on which my career was then built.
I spent 7 years doing that before having a significant period of burn out and depression. I used to sit and think about the farm and in my mind all I could see was my favourite part of the farm on a sunny day. So I returned to work with my dad for 4 years, but as Brexit appeared, the uncertainty that that brought for farms of our size, led me to return to working with Salesforce and I gradually got a number of promotions before sitting in my current role. Time will tell how much longer I carry on for. One thing I have learn over the years is that you can only plan so much - businesses often have different ideas about where you are heading and the uncertainty that always exists can often result in changes of direction. Is this where I dreamt of ending up? Absolutely not but it has been an interesting path so far