Most people have a reputation at work. The interesting part is that they don't always know what it is. Ask somebody to describe themselves professionally and you'll usually hear things like hardworking, reliable, ambitious, organised or good with people. Those are perfectly reasonable descriptions, but they aren't necessarily the words their colleagues would use if you weren't in the room. That is where things become more interesting. What happens when a problem appears and s

Some Mondays are just bad. You wake up tired, the journey to work doesn't go to plan, your inbox is already full before you've properly started and the first meeting of the morning somehow creates three more problems than it solves. A customer is unhappy, a colleague is off sick, a deadline has moved and your manager chooses today to ask about the one thing you haven't quite finished. By lunchtime, you're looking at job vacancies. By three o'clock, you're imagining yourself w

Recruitment is a mental game. You can know your market inside out, have great clients, a strong candidate network and years of experience, but if your thinking starts working against you, your performance usually follows. I have seen this throughout my career. Good recruiters have a difficult month and suddenly question whether they can still do the job. Candidates get one rejection and start believing nobody will hire them. Hiring managers lose one strong candidate and convi

It sounds like a simple question, but it rarely is. When I speak to people working across optics, I sometimes think we spend so much time discussing progression, salaries, testing times, targets and the next career move that we overlook a much more fundamental question: are you actually proud of the work you are doing now? That isn't the same as asking whether you enjoy every day. Nobody does. It isn't about whether every patient leaves delighted, whether the clinic runs perf