Stuttering Up The Career Ladder

I was a person who hated going to school. Hate is a very strong word but hate school I did.

I was quite bright and found the majority of the subjects to be fairly easy to understand but I had a stutter and a severe lack of confidence which made socialising some what difficult. I am not a person who has a need to be liked but back then, at that age, I was a person who certainly did not want to be disliked.

I left school at the first opportunity - my examination results were very good which led to many people questioning my decision to quit school. I was never going to return but I now had the task of trying to find employment.

Attending an interview for somebody like me – somebody who has a speech impediment – is some what of a nightmare. All of those direct questions and the pressure. It took around seven months and a great many interviews before I finally managed to gain employment.

I was appointed at the lowest grade of a local insurance company and was basically a filing clerk. The pay was awful but the job itself was very very easy and did not require any form of communication skills.

I was more than capable, in my opinion, of achieving a much higher grade within the company however was quite happy where I was, doing what I was doing. But was I really content or was I just accepting second best? I knew that in reality the only reason that I did not want to gain promotion was due to my lack of fluency. As an example the next grade up from the filing clerk was a position which involved a lot of talking including speaking on the telephone – speaking on the telephone was where my stutter would be at its most severe at this stage of my life.

In the end I stayed at the lowest grade for over four years – the average period that people stay on this grade is six months.

This was a little insight into the way in which certain people who stutter struggle to climb the career ladder.

If you have enjoyed this blog post I will continue the theme on my next post going on to explain how I coped – or didn’t cope - with the pressures of this higher grade.