“From Jonathan Swift to cyber security in three-and-a-half leaps” is how Jessica sums up her journey from Corpus to her current career.

“As a female undergraduate, having been educated at a comprehensive school, my 1991 matriculation placed me in an exclusive club for the 8 percent*. It was quite a culture shock. Living away from home for the first time is hard enough, let alone encountering gowns and gongs at dinnertime. But the biggest shock of all was finding myself intellectually inferior, after a decade of coasting at the top of the class.”

Jessica admits to finding the work ‘excruciatingly difficult’ at first, only recovering some confidence in the third year when she was able to pursue more of her own interests through her course.

“At a collegiate university like Cambridge, and particularly a small college like Corpus, chat across disciplines is the most natural thing in the world. We spent much time in the bar pontificating on everything from Karl Popper to colour vision to Jonathan Swift, my favourite author. No topic was off-limits, and that sense has stayed with me ever since. Hence perhaps my journey from English to cyber security, which happened in three-and-a-half unplanned career leaps.”

Jessica’s first job after Corpus was in public relations. “I didn't know what PR was, but still thought doing it for a charity could be good.” After failing to find any paid jobs in charity PR, she got a job in technology PR. Then, having learnt what PR was, she discovered that she ‘was distinctly ill-suited to it’ but says she managed to cover this up for long enough to get a PR job at technology industry analysis firm, Ovum.

“Ovum had a wonderfully cerebral culture where rigorous analysis and decent prose were valued. The analytical skills I’d originally learnt during my English degree transferred pretty well! I left the PR department in short order and became an analyst, spending the next two decades consulting with tech companies, leading research projects and building teams.” This period was briefly interrupted by two maternity leaves and a spell developing a start-up. “I was always lucky to work with companies and colleagues who were flexible. Part-time working allowed me to keep doing the work I loved.”

The ‘half’ leap she explains was a parallel career in the charity sector she developed ‘accidentally’, first volunteering and later becoming Chair of Trustees at a large national charity - the National Childbirth Trust - which she did alongside her day job. “It was like a governance boot camp … an absolutely brilliant way to develop boardroom perspective, although rather stressful.” 

As the pandemic struck, Jessica says she ‘went portfolio’ taking on a number of strategy-focused projects and roles that settled in and around cyber security and AI. This evolved into her current role as interim Chief Executive at Pionen, a cyber security consultancy, with non-executive directorships at the UK Cyber Security Council and Pivotl, a data engineering company. 

* “Unreliable figures bandied around at the time suggested women made up a third of Corpus undergraduates, and non-selective state school pupils a quarter.”