'The last thing I wanted was to work in education': my path to the best job in the world

It happened almost by accident. I never planned to work in education; in fact, growing up as a rebellious troublemaker whose parents worked as teachers, the last thing I wanted to do was to follow in their footsteps.

Imagine my surprise then, when at the age of 20 I boarded a plane to Hong Kong on a journey that would set the blueprint for the rest of my career.

I had recently completed the most rudimentary of teaching qualifications: a two-day Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course in London. To my own surprise, that was enough to qualify me for a number of jobs posted on TEFL’s (equally rudimentary – this was 2005, after all) website.

Initially, I applied to positions in Poland and Japan. But then, out of the blue, a company in China contacted me offering a great package: competitive salary, flights, accommodation, meal allowance, health insurance and daily transport. I immediately said yes,. Two weeks later, I was boarding a plane to Hong Kong – my first time living away from home, outside the bucolic valley of Marlow Bottom where I grew up. 

A pretty useless English teacher

My first challenge came at the border to mainland China. I’d travelled to China without the – unbeknown to me – necessary visa, and when the immigration officer flicked through my passport and found nothing, I met his questions with a similarly blank stare. However, it wasn’t anything that £100 (which was everything I had in my wallet) and a sweet smile couldn’t fix – this was 2005 after all. Thirty minutes later, the immigration officer returned with what must have been a valid tourist visa. 

I navigated my time in China with all the aplomb of Mr Bean walking through a rosebush and somehow emerging unscathed. I had no idea what I was doing half the time, but somehow I muddled through everything, picking up knowledge along the way. This was my first time living away from home, so I also had to learn how to cook, do laundry, look after my own money and manage my time.

I turned out to be a pretty useless English teacher. I spent the majority of my time in the classroom learning Chinese phrases and words from my students, which I would then practise on shopkeepers, taxi drivers – anyone who would listen. My ever-astute colleague Celina noticed this, and suggested that I enrol in a Chinese-language course at university. 

So, after I completed my one-year teaching contract, I found myself at the Xi’an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi province. My classmates came from all over Asia: Kazakhstan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, plus a few students from Europe and North America. I spent two years studying in Xi’an before applying as a transfer student to SOAS University of London, enrolling in year three of the BA Chinese programme.

A reluctant salesman

As soon as I finished at SOAS, I returned to China – I was so keen to get back that I even missed my own graduation ceremony. I had a job at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo – a huge celebration of countries, cultures and people, accurately described by one of my friends as “Like the Olympics, but without the sport”. 

It was there that I met one of the pro vice-chancellors from the University of Liverpool, who overheard me chatting in Mandarin with my colleagues. At that time, Liverpool was setting up a joint university in Suzhou with my alma mater, the Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, and he was on the lookout for people who could contribute to the project. 

He left me a business card and – long-story long – less than six months later I joined the student recruitment and admissions office as an international-student recruitment manager for Greater China. 

Over the following 12 months, I attended education exhibitions and visited schools across China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, speaking to students and their families about study opportunities at Liverpool. After a year, I moved to Goldsmiths, University of London to carry out the same role. 

However, throughout this time, something was nibbling away at me. While I certainly enjoyed the travel and the fancy hotels, and I really enjoyed meeting students and helping them plan their futures, I didn’t particularly enjoy the sales aspect of the job, which was getting more prominent as competition increased for international student places at UK universities. 

Thus, in 2016, I decided to consolidate my skills and experience in UK admissions and my passion for working directly with young learners, and work in an international school as a university and careers-guidance counsellor. 

One of the most rewarding jobs in the world

After a spate of unsuccessful job applications to international schools, I figured something was missing. Determined in my goal, I enrolled in a postgraduate diploma in counselling psychology. This course demonstrated that I had core counselling skills – which was a requirement of many of the jobs I’d applied for. 

My plan worked, and in 2019 I started working as a university-guidance counsellor at a bilingual Mandarin-English IB school in Hong Kong – the perfect home for my skills, experience and fluency in Chinese.

I often get asked by university admissions officers what’s the best advice for someone who wants to jump across to the other side of the desk and work as a school counsellor. School counsellors come from many different backgrounds: some via the psychology and mental-health route and some from university admissions offices, while others evolve their teaching roles. My advice would be to ensure that you have demonstrable core counselling skills – at the end of the day, you will be working closely with a broad and dynamic range of young people, which requires energy, empathy and emotional intelligence. 

Building early rapport, listening without judgement and acknowledging each student as an individual are key to being a great counsellor.

For me, being a counsellor is one of the most rewarding jobs in the world. I get to walk alongside students as they experience the highs and lows of high-school life, offering them a constant, calm, accepting presence. And – perhaps selfishly – I also get to live vicariously through their post-secondary journeys, in all their multitudinous complexities. 

While I didn’t quite manage to avoid entering the same industry as my parents (20-year-old Jim would be so disappointed) I also didn’t quite become a teacher – despite trying. But I have found great joy and comfort from being able to give students the guidance and support they need in those crucial teenage years – guidance and support I never really had myself.