A job that didn't exist

Not quite a job, actually. I wrote to the press office - because I didn't know how else to get in front of anyone - and asked whether they might let me work for them for a year, unpaid, so I could finally get the recent experience nobody would hire me without. I told them I was a social housing tenant of fourteen years. I told them I was a single parent of three. I told them I was two-thirds of the way through a computer science degree I'd been chipping away at part-time, and that I'd been made redundant from the career I loved when my youngest was a few months old, and hadn't found my way back in since. I apologised, more than once, for troubling them. I asked if, failing everything else, they could just forward the email to someone in HR.

That email is the reason I'm sitting here now, writing this. But it isn't where the story starts. To understand why a fairly experienced software consultant was reduced to cold-emailing a press office and offering to work for nothing, you have to go back a lot further than 2024.

The world I loved

I got into technology in 1992, at a small Norfolk firm called MDF Systems - troubleshooting accounting and HR software, learning by fixing what was broken. A few years in, I took a leap and spent a year in Johannesburg, working for LinMax, a distributor of Syspro ERP software based a few miles from Syspro's own headquarters. LinMax was owned by two women, Linda and Maxine. It was a steep, brilliant year of learning, and in places a genuinely frightening one - South Africa in the 1990s was a hard place to be finding your feet, and I came back with stories I still don't tell at dinner parties.

Back in the UK, I spent twelve years as a senior software consultant, at Information Engineering Group and then K3, implementing accounting, CRM, HR and full ERP systems, including a long secondment onto a manufacturing client's site. I was good at it. I loved it. It was not, in those years, a world built with me in mind, and I have my share of memories from it I'll save for another piece. But by 2009, I had seventeen years of hard-won expertise behind me, in a career I had no intention of leaving.

The year everything gave way at once

In 2008, while I was pregnant with my youngest, my relationship with the girls' father ended. I was already parenting alone by the time she was born. A few months later, I was made redundant.

Not from just anywhere, either. I'd been working for the one Syspro distributor with a base in Norfolk - every other route back into that world sat in Manchester, four hours from home and from my mother, my only real support. The financial crash that same year meant that when I sold my house, I sold it at a loss. Redundant, in negative equity, alone with three small children, I ended up in social housing.

But I don't want to tell it as something that simply happened to me, because it wasn't only that. Relocating for work was never something I'd have done to three small children who needed one parent going nowhere. So I stayed, and started again, in a field I'd never worked in before.

Twelve years, built by hand

That field was digital marketing. I retrained, and in 2009 started SearchFruits, a home-based digital marketing agency, helped along by a £1,500 startup grant from my local council.

I ran it for twelve years. In 2013, the Guardian featured it in their small business showcase, and the piece still captures those years better than I could summarise now: working from home, fitting client work around sports days and school plays, running Facebook campaigns for small businesses across Norfolk in the hours after the children were in bed. There's a line in it about my daughters, then nine and seven, helping me search stock-image sites for pictures to go with articles I'd written, while I cooked dinner. That was just what our normal looked like. The following year, I was invited to the government's launch of the Growth Vouchers programme and met Lord Young, then the Prime Minister's Enterprise Adviser - a small, quiet marker that the business I'd built at my kitchen table was being noticed well beyond it.

It wasn't a quiet decade, either. From 2014, while still running SearchFruits, I was also Head of Paid Media at a Norwich agency called NoticeMedia, responsible for a £10 million paid advertising budget. Two demanding roles at once, three girls largely on my own, and all of it run from a council flat, around school runs, sports days and whatever else the week threw at us - chickenpox, sick days, the ordinary chaos of small children who don't know or care what deadline you're on. Somewhere in among those years, I also learned that one of my daughters had additional needs of her own, which only deepened how much the flexibility of that life mattered, long after the reasons I'd first built it that way.

Never quite standing still

In 2019, I enrolled part-time in a computer science degree with the Open University - the start, though I didn't fully know it yet, of finding my way back to the work I'd never stopped missing.

When SearchFruits closed in 2021, I didn't take a break. I spent a year with Norfolk and Suffolk Constabulary's cyber crime team, timed alongside the cyber security module of my degree, and another year as a Digital Skills Coach at Norwich City College, helping adults build the digital confidence I'd spent a career building for myself.

By the summer of 2024, I was two-thirds through my degree, had picked up cyber crime and digital skills certifications along the way, and had started teaching myself Microsoft Dynamics in what spare time I had. And I still could not get a single interview. Every rejection came back to the same line: not enough recent, relevant experience.

The letter

Which is how I ended up writing that email. I wasn't trying to be clever or strategic. I named exactly what I was - a tenant, a carer, a parent, a student - because those were the only credentials I had left, and I'd stopped believing that hiding any of it would help. I asked for the smallest thing I could think of: not a job, just a year of unpaid experience, so someone, somewhere, would eventually see relevant work on my CV instead of a gap.

Within days, it had reached a director in the right part of the business. He didn't offer me the unpaid placement I'd asked for. He told me, plainly, that he wasn't in the business of not paying people who worked for him, and asked if I'd have time for a call.

Won properly

I want to be completely clear about what happened next, because I'm proud of it exactly as it was, not as a nicer story might tell it. Nobody handed me anything. The housing association had an advertised Microsoft Dynamics Consultant role, like any other vacancy on its website. I applied through the normal process, and was formally interviewed like every other candidate. The email had opened a door to be considered. It hadn't opened the job. I got it on the same terms as anyone else would have - which is exactly how I wanted it.

I started there in November 2024.

Where that leaves me now

I don't think of the fifteen years between that redundancy and this job as a gap, or a detour, or a comeback, even though it's tempting to shape it that way for a tidier story. It was seventeen years of consultancy, then twelve years building a business by hand around three daughters, five of those years also carrying a serious commercial role, then a further three years adding a degree, a cyber crime placement and a teaching role, one after another, without ever really stopping. What changed in 2024 wasn't that I suddenly became capable of doing this work again. It's that someone finally looked past the gap in my CV long enough to notice everything that had actually been happening inside it.

That's the woman behind the consultant and the tenant you'll read about elsewhere on this site: someone who has spent more than thirty years rebuilding, retraining and re-entering rooms that weren't always built with her in mind, usually with three daughters in tow, and who has never yet found a wall she was willing to leave unclimbed.

Nicole Jameson