AIBU to find career advice from privileged speakers tone deaf?

My friend has a fairly successful career.. not pass remarkably so. But when she decided that she wanted to retrain and worked out the logistics she made huge sacrifices. She held down FT work while studying at night for 2 years but needed to do a few months work experience too. Once she started the process she sold her car and moved into a mature student house share, 4 sharing a bathroom in a run down house. She saved like crazy for about a year and had enough to support herself during her unpaid work experience and for the first few months of low pay in her new role. It's a good example of someone making real sacrifices for an end goal and I admire her so much more for it. Of course that's not possible with kids but it's something that most people are not prepared to do

I think once we've been through the ordeal of working, childcare, schools, events etc etc , and then we are presented with either a female who had nannies or a man with a sah wife, telling us how hard they had it yet they still pulled through....well they are lucky we dont rugby tackle them on the way out

I worked at a train company where the HR organised really leftfield speakers. The most memorable one was a woman who had accidently killed a fellow pupil at school when they were throwing the javelin. Basically how ahe coped afterwards. It was impressive. There was a second speaker a few months later, also I think with a theme wirh a death angle. But you can definitely get some interesting speakers if you do enough research.

Do we think it’s age / menopause that make us see through these types? As a young woman I would have been impressed but now at 50 I am deeply cynical. Totally agree with questioning the constant striving. Who can be bothered with that.

on a related note I have started to hate all these “Women in xxx” events and posts on LinkedIn.
just about women doing everything possible no matter what the cost to their personal life to be highly successful senior leaders in their careers. I wish we could hear from the average woman who is happy and mildly succesful….much more representative and relatable.
A colleague posted something on LinkedIn lately that was all about if you are 100% ready/suitable for a role - then you are not pushing yourself enough and won’t grow. Why can’t we just do a job that we know how to do & hopefully enjoy or at least tolerate. Why does society/corporate world want us to be always striving to be uncomfortable and pushing ourselves. I want to clock off at 5 and have energy for a life outside of work.

I went to a women's networking thing once and the speaker was a neurodivergence coach who I was really interested in hearing as I had recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Her advice?...Do what she did and bugger off to Bali for 12 months to 'find herself'... I'll just leave all my kids here to fend for themselves then shall I?

I no longer take advice or read books by men about creative writing (a hobby). It tends to boil down to : get up early, leave the house and focus on your work. There seems to be little mention of family life. There’s the assumption you’ll have someone to do the work at home.

I find it similar in men who write about time management. Again, get up at 5am, work out, etc. if I got up at 5am, my kid would too. Then who watches them while I work out?

Read Careless People for the reality of working with Sandberg. The author
is not allowed to speak about her own book due to metas gagging order against her. “Lean in” not enough 🙄 in the world.

I went on to become a freelancer much later after a successful high-paying corporate career. Still single and self-supported. I wasn't trying to suggest that women can't and don't make this work on their own behalf (though I can see how my post read like that). It was more a "check your privilege" thought.

I know quite a few people who work a 9-5 job and then have there own business in the evening including some senior managers who are trying to leave there industry.

I'm single (with two kids) and just been made redundant from my well paid job in tech. My redundancy money is helping me to start picking up freelance work for myself two days a week while I have found a three days a week job to bring in steady income, pension, holiday pay etc.. I'm not saying it's easy or not nerve racking but I don't have a husband at all to pay for me. My ex-line manager leaves the company in December and is also setting up her own business. I would never of chosen to be made redundant and nor would she, it's been toxic but we are all trying to make it work so we don't end up in this situation again.

One thing to take away from this is that your speaker has/had an extraordinary employer who offered a supportive response to a valued colleague.

OP, I agree. It is annoying.

Usually these talks are for speakers to tell everyone how wonderful they are to have made it as a woman and for the audience to aspire to be like them, glossing over the house husband or high earning spouse or inheritance.

It is a similar criticism of Sheryl Sandberg's book 'Lean in'. The former COO of Facebook no less. Bet if we had a fraction of her being at the right place/right time and compensation, we could lean in so much we would be horizontal.

@BananaPeelsEveryone equates private school with Eton. Obviously there is a whole mix of private schools and people who go to them! We have no connections either but both my DDs have recognised the need to network in their careers. However that isn’t possible for some areas of work. I do think people can suss out how to get on in their chosen field, but it’s a personal route quite often. It’s nothing to do with learning from others - they aren’t you and have mostly had a charmed life!

it applies generationally too. So much easier for boomers and Gen X to find jobs so frankly their advice is pretty pointless. I include myself in that.

It's kind of a self selecting group. People that want to make a living advising others based on their own experience are naturally going to be tending towards gobshites.

Anyone with a bit of self awareness is likely to be a too low key for this sort of gig.

Exceptions as always but in general

YANBU. Did you ask the question in the session? Not for the answer or as a gotcha moment but so that everyone else in the room can see the inequity being platformed.

"I was really invested in your talk as I'm in a very similar situation to the one you described before your career break. How did you afford to not work for 7 months?"

Inspirational speakers are only inspirational if they INSPIRE you to make a change in your own life. There's no wriggle room for most of us to make that kind of change. It's distasteful and foolish of her not to have referenced this in her presentation e.g. "I know I was in a privileged situation in that I could afford to take that 7 month hiatus thanks to my husband's salary/inheritance/mega yacht sale/only fans, but this is about looking at taking a beat and making a change. You'll not have the exact journey I had, but what is in your power to change?" or some other such LinkedIn bullshit.

This drives me mad.
I basically stopped listening to anything a man had to say about career unless I knew he had a wife with a full-on job as otherwise it didn't apply.
And anyone who said 'I always make dinner with family a priority' as the key to their work life balance, as if that's the goal rather than the absolute minimum. Who cooked the dinner, who did bed time and bath, who ferried the kids to their activities beforehand?
The people who say family is their number one priority but are always in the office.
Or the panel where they all talked about how they navigated into various roles and on further questioning it was their manager each time who had finagled the next role for them, not anything they did themselves. I asked had they ever found a new role without manager support and got blank looks.
Honestly there's so much that is luck and so much that is making decisions I wouldn't, that I honestly don't think these discussions are ever helpful.
The only good advice I've ever got was about buying in as much help as you can afford and not marrying your glass ceiling.

My favourite was a “semi retired” white 50 something male whose opening point was that you had to work hard . He demonstrated this by discussing his mother, a typist in the 50s/60s and not in the room. Apparently she was too lazy to work hard so stayed a typist.
you know, after she had turned down Oxford and Cambridge, and offers to be prime minister etc. she was a typist in the NW of England in the 50s who worked her ass off to pay for her ungrateful son who then stood there boasting about how he was semi retired but had no word of thanks for his elderly mum who did her best for him.
what an absolute twat.

I can assure you that as someone who was brought up middle class, private school. I have no contracts either and wouldn’t know where to start. None of my friends from my school would either. I was one the few people who had no one to ask for my child to do work experience as many people from my school became teachers and academics. I wouldn’t have a clue where a person would start to get something published and I doubt many people would regardless of upbringing. Once you get into the wider world your upbringing means very little

I try to be honest. I got made redundant from a senior position earlier this year (was the only female in the SLT) and I’m honest that I can afford to be unemployed looking for my next job because DH earns well. However I have always been open and honest about having a disability and doing those events because I do think it can help others to be seen in senior roles.

I have a friend who is an executive coach and posts on LinkedIn all the time about how successful she is, their lifestyle etc. the reality her parents bought their big detached house, pay the school fees and do a lot of childcare. Her business does not fund her lifestyle at all.

I once went on a career building course with a bunch of other women (strangers) and it emerged that all of us would like to become freelancers. I spent 24 hours racking my brain about how I could possibly make it work when suddenly the penny dropped that while I was single and totally dependent on myself, they were all married and expecting their husbands’ salaries to support their start ups/part time work.

@SockQueen People have to make it work but my DH was self employed and never did a nursery run in his life! For many women, having it all is doing it all. Hence low birth rate and women getting established in their jobs before a baby!

@Gladystheimpaler To be honest, that’s a throw away line! It’s just saying the reader liked what you wrote. If you were an academic, getting something published isn’t unusual in specific journals.

While I think that some advice can be tone deaf, the three people I know who have taken time out of work for various reasons (stress, caring responsibilities etc) have been nurses and charity workers with no high earning other half.

And love that there’s the insinuation a woman can only get senior with sex. My last three roles I was approached to interview for rather than applying because of the network and reputation I have. And I have two of the most senior men in the global company I work for that have told me if I wanted to come back into their teams they would create a role. So sometimes it does just happen because you’re good at your job! I have no public school background, family or friends in the industry.