Will I get sussed?

I had a little crisis of confidence on Friday. I don't have a clue how to do my new job. Not really.

It's like this. Once upon a time I went to school and turned out to be very good at exams. This is because I can remember a lot of things for a short time, which helps you do things like history, and also can spot when things I don't know are similar in some important way to other things that I do know, which helps you do things like chemistry.

So I ended up at Cambridge University doing a degree in social and political science, where I spent three years reading complicated books and developing a new technique which involved writing essays by knitting together little bits of information from multiple sources in a reasonably coherent order without necessarily understanding all of it. Then I had to remember it all for just over a week while I did my finals, and then I was free.

Since then I have worked in a series of environments -- insurance, IT, information science, education, new media -- about which I have known absolutely nothing of any depth. I have simply applied my ability to remember things, my ability to spot patterns and my ability to communicate to the job in hand, worked hard enough not to be ashamed of myself, and moved slowly towards doing something I can see the point of.

So you could say I have spent my life convincing people that I know a lot more about the business in hand than I actually do. And if you think that I have got each new job on the back of my experience in my previous job, I am currently working in development as a knowledge and information manager based on the fact that I know how to run a website based on the fact that I wrote about knowledge and information management based on the fact that I ... what? Wanted to move to Oxford to be with my Significant Ex, and I copyedited an article for school librarians better than anyone else on the day. That saved me from the job as a researcher in the insurance industry which I got because I had done some questionnaire coding for a research project and hey, that was close enough.

Really, everything I sell myself on is built on foundations of sand. And what if they find that out, just as I am getting to do something useful?

The other argument goes that this is what everyone does, and the whole pain of adult life is realising this. Everybody is winging it, all the time. How scary is that?

joella