This is In Her Making — the show for ambitious women reverse-engineering the path to the top, one honest conversation at a time.

Today I'm sitting down with Vanessa Vallely. Vanessa left school at sixteen with barely a qualification to her name, grew up on a council estate in East London, and built a twenty-five year career in financial services. She then went on to found We Are The City in 2008, which is now one of the UK's biggest platforms for women, with over a hundred and twenty thousand members. She's been awarded an OBE for services to women and the economy, she's got an honorary doctorate from Warwick Business School. Vanessa has been named GQ UK's Top 100 Connected Women, the Evening Standard's 1000 Most Influential Londoners and The International Alliance for Women's Top 100 Women globally, to name a few…

In this episode, we get into the stuff no one really says out loud: why "job-hopping" might actually be the smartest move on your resume, how to be intentional and authentic with your personal brand, why "networking" is a dirty word, and the politics nobody warns you about until you're in the room. Vanessa's about twenty-five years further down the road than most of us, and she's handing over everything she's learned.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.