7 lessons for building your career

Advice for year 12 students at UoMs Careers Fair

Kayla J Heffernan
11 min readJul 5, 2022
Photo by Justin Luebke on Unsplash

Last year I gave the keynote at The University of Melbourne’s Careers Fair. The audience was year 12 students who are about to graduate high school and their parents/carers. At the time I tweeted the lessons and a few people asked me to turn it into a blog post. I’ve umm’ed and ahh’ed about doing so as it’s a lot more personal than I usually write. I’ve decided to go for it but be forewarned I talk a lot about myself! Still, this background sets the grounding for the lessons herein.

Lesson 1: Find a way to follow your passions

Photo by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE on Unsplash

When I was a kid, I was fortunate enough to have a printer and a computer at home, which not many people did back then (yes, I’m old). I’m told that 3-year-old me used to dance to the rocking sounds of the dot matrix printer (don’t worry, the year 12 audience had no idea what this was either). A 7-year-old me used to pretend to be hacking into our DOS computer.

My (much) older brother was studying programming at university which meant that our pre-Windows computer was soon upgraded. While there were two…

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Kayla J Heffernan

Head of UX. Passionate about solving ambiguous problems with solutions that are accessible and inclusive. I write every couple of months about design.