I originally wanted to be a vet, applied to university to study aeronautical engineering and ended up with a degree in philosophy and international relations. So it’s fair to say my launch into any kind of career is best described as ‘random’.

As anyone with a philosophy degree will tell you, there are limited options to making a living out of that.

For a while I had a go at publishing, working in production for a legal publisher. I discovered many things from proof-reading law reports – for example, causing an accident because you’re distracted by a bee in your car is not a criminal offence, but it is if you’re distracted by a fly. But after a company restructure, I found myself looking for another job.

At the time the Scottish Equitable Life Assurance Society was rebranding as Scottish Equitable plc (later to become Aegon) and needed proofreaders to check everything with their name on it, from product literature to delivery vans.

After starting there, over the next 15 years I worked my way through various marketing and business information roles, eventually coming back to my international relations roots and specialising in European public affairs. With a head office in the Hague and a very well-regarded public affairs team in the UK, it was a great place to see the sharp end of public policy at a European level.

I’m grateful to Aegon for supporting me to do marketing qualifications and an MBA with the Open University. The OU is a route to further qualifications I very much recommend – the teaching is excellent and the range of students is wide. You might meet find yourself discussing business strategy with anyone from a barista to a retraining submariner.

I decided to move on when several people told me about a job advertised in London at the financial services regulator, then the FSA. It was a policy support role for the statutory Panels who advise the regulator (now the FCA).

The Panels (including several Practitioner Panels of senior industry people) are consulted confidentially by the regulator before policy gets out into the wild. I started as a European policy adviser and was pretty much thrown in at the deep end –  on my first day my job was to accompany Panel members on a trip to visit European parliamentarians in Brussels.

I spent 11 years at the FCA, the last two working remotely from Scotland. It was a fascinating, and in some ways terrifying, job as you could be asked to work on any aspect of the regulator’s remit, which is vast. And the Panel members are some of the sharpest minds in the industry, so there was much to learn seeing them operate in Panel meetings.

But having moved back to Scotland I realised I didn’t want to return to London once things got back to ‘normal’. I’d joined some of the Home Games webinars from the lang cat during lockdown, and liked the way they seemed to operate, so when I heard there might be opportunities there it felt like a sign.

I’ve been here since summer 2022, working on my favourite subject which is analysing what the regulators and the government are trying to do and communicating it in a way that normal people can understand. It’s been a big shift from working for very large organisations to a small one, but it’s been a refreshing change and there is, if anything, more variety in the work I do.

And so far, I haven’t been attacked by any bees.   

Alison Gay is senior regulatory consultant at the lang cat