The Career Strategy for Ambitious Young Professional Women
The Full Character Career Playbook: A Guide to Land Your Dream Job, Navigating the Workplace, and Building a Life You Love.
£27.00
A million people watched a video about what nobody tells you when you step into management for the first time. This is the full version of that conversation, and every other conversation the career advice industry keeps skipping.
Nobody Prepared Me For This is your official career playbook for ambitious, early-career women who are done waiting for the right moment, the right credential, and the right person to give them permission to want more. It covers everything from landing the job to leading the team to building a career that reflects the full version of who you are, without apology and without picking a lane.
What is inside:
Chapter 1: The permission problem. Why your multi-passionate nature is not a focus issue but a documented cognitive advantage, and how to stop waiting for external validation before you act.
Chapter 2: The job pipeline. The complete process from identifying the right roles, deep pre-application research, writing the application that actually gets shortlisted, and accessing the hidden job market that most candidates never find.
Chapter 3: Early leadership. The honest account of what stepping into your first management role actually feels like, how to manage people who were once your peers, how to manage your own manager effectively, and how to build professional authority without tenure or time.
Chapter 4: Productivity for multi-passionate women. A five-principle system built for women holding multiple serious commitments simultaneously, managing energy not just time, designing weekly architecture that protects what matters, and understanding recovery as a professional input, not a luxury.
Chapter 5: Navigating the room. What the research says about unwritten professional rules, visibility strategy, sponsorship versus mentorship, and the real conversation about code-switching and identity in professional environments — particularly for women of colour.
Chapter 6: Your own timeline. How to define success on your terms, build and narrate a non-linear career, think in decades rather than years, and use everything in this playbook as a living system rather than a one-time read.
Every chapter includes peer-reviewed research, the author's own career story, and practical written activities with reflection space.
Who this is for:
Women in their first five years of professional or teaching careers. Early-career women navigating a first leadership or management role. Multi-passionate women who have been told to specialise and have never quite believed it. Women of colour navigating professional environments that were not designed with them in mind. Anyone who has watched a career advice video and thought, yes, but what do I actually do next?
Who wrote it:
Shana Francis is a Senior Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education, a CMI Level 7 qualified leadership coach, and the host of the Breaking the Timeline podcast and newsletter. She built a multi-hyphenate career without picking a lane and created this playbook because she needed it at 22, and it did not exist.
£27. Instant digital download. No fluff. No filler. Just the guide.