For the past few years, I’ve used this newsletter to share insights from The Land Collective - our work with employers, social mobility initiatives, and programmes designed to support diverse early talent. That work continues, but over time, something started to shift.
I realised that the ideas I was most drawn to stretched far beyond early careers programmes. They were about people, work, culture and systems, and more importantly how careers are built (and sometimes broken) in the messy intersection of opportunity, ambition, and inequality.
I wanted space to write about that, not as an organisation, but as me.
After years working with young people, employers, and teams across different industries, I’ve seen the same patterns play out repeatedly:
Talented people losing confidence because of culture, not capability.
Employers trying to diversify but replicating the same structures that keep things stagnant.
Young professionals entering workplaces that were never designed with them in mind.
These are not just HR problems, but social ones. They reveal how work has evolved and how it hasn’t. Not on Paper is where I’ll unpack those stories. The name comes from that tension between what looks good on paper and what actually happens in practice.
If you’ve been here for the early careers content, you’ll still find plenty of that but through a wider lens. Some weeks it’ll be analysis, other weeks, personal reflection. Occasionally, I’ll share lessons from my consulting work - whether designing talent programmes or helping organisations rethink how they grow people.
This shift also opens space to talk more openly about my professional world, what I do, who I help, and how.
Work is changing faster than the systems that support it. We’re seeing the erosion of patience, mentorship, and growth replaced by quick results, leaner teams, and silent expectations. Meanwhile, professionals are navigating it all in public, often without the grounding they need.
I want Not on Paper to be a home for the conversations we rarely have: the ones about power, culture, and human development inside the modern workplace. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, stay tuned and if you know someone who’d enjoy these essays, feel free to forward this or share the link to subscribe!