A little while ago I was sitting in a busy city cafe and noticed a chap sitting a couple of tables away. He was wearing a business shirt and trousers and smart leather shoes. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and i noticed a bunch of tattoos. I just had to introduce myself to this guy, tell him what I did for a living and ask him for an interview. Thankfully he said yes. We’ll call him Reg – not his real name. By the way … the photo on the left isn’t Reg!

Here is an “uncut” extract from my chat with Reg.

Have your tattoos ever got in the way of you getting a job since you’ve had them?

James: Yeah, great.  Go for it.

Reg: My tattoos?  No.  To clarify, my tattoos go down to the wrist on one arm and they protrude below a short shirt sleeve length on the other.  I have long hair.

James: Very long.

Reg: I have a nose ring.  I have earrings in my ears.  At one point I had my throat pierced and I work in a corporate environment.

James: Hang on.  Throat pierced?  How?

Reg: I had three in my throat.  I have them – so, what I’m displaying is transdermal implants in my chest that used to run the length of my throat.

James: Really?

Reg: And I don’t wear a tie at work.  So, have my tattoos got in the way of my job?  No, there’s plenty of other things that got in the way first.  So, the tattoos have done nothing.  However, the long hair and the earrings certainly have when it came to certain positions where they were customer facing or internally around certain conference tables or board tables at a management level that people are uncomfortable.  So, I know for a fact that they’ve gotten in the way.  Yes.

James: So, other people within the bank, either your peers or direct reports or people above you, do they feel it, do they think that, they don’t know how to take you or it makes them feel uneasy, or what?

Reg: I think they just have an impression of bankers, a certain, you know, the pin-striped suit.

James: Oh, you’ve got a pin-striped suit on?

Reg: Which I am wearing, but there’s just certain, a mould that they expect people to fit and they are not so willing to take you seriously if you don’t fit that mould.   With the long hair and the piercings and whatever, that’s fine to put in a processing center, but do you have a seriousness of mind and an education that we can respect and is gonna add value, I think there’s a perception that straight away shuts that down.

James: Can you tell us what your role is and what’s your background?  Are you degree qualified?  Have you done a doctorate?  What?

Reg: Okay, so my current role is, I work in a business transformation team that does project work, specifically, related to scope and requirements, benefits realisation, stakeholder management, leveraging and extending capabilities to develop new products and processes, the strategy work.  So, that’s the role I’m in now.  My background has been project management within commercial lending and asset finance.  Prior to that I did process engineering in back office areas.  I have no formal degrees.  I just have a lot of confidence and a little bit of arrogance.  I once, this is a true story, I got asked to build a database in Access and I said sure, and then I had to go and buy an Access developer book and read it over the weekend, build a database the next week.

James: Which I did.

Reg: Which I did.  Yes.  So, there’s a certain level of arrogance.  I say arrogance, but it’s just self-belief that I have that carries me through sometimes.

James: But, the thing about it is, as a side point, sometimes education gets in the way, because no one told you, ‘You can’t read a book on the weekend and build a database.  You can’t do that.  You have to go to university and learn about the theory of design and about the background and all this.’  No.

Reg: Yeah.  The Internet’s a wonderful thing, right?  [laughter]  You look up a few rules on normalisation and away you go.

Tune into next post for part 2 of this great chat with Reg.

Keep well,

James E

James Evangelidis

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Tagged as: piercings, Reg, tattoos