‘Tech isn’t just for geeks’: Amy Golding on why women don’t need a science degree to be successful

View From The Top: The 33-year-old is the youngest CEO of a $100m company

’I always loved English at school, and I didn’t like maths and science’ (Abi Galatia)

“The future is being built by white guys with a science degree,” says Amy Golding, bleakly. Fortunately the 33-year-old CEO of Opus Talent Solutions has a plan to change all that. And, refreshingly, the answer is not to dragoon more schoolgirls into getting science degrees.

Golding herself, although now fluent in tech, doesn’t have one. Her mother is a teacher and her father is a freelance journalist and she was brought up in Greenwich on words rather than numbers and binary code. “I always loved English at school, and I didn’t like maths and science.”

But even as a kid, she says, “I wanted to earn money and be useful”. Her varied CV includes car washing aged 7. At the age of eight she came up with the idea of hand-made magazines, where she wrote all the articles and did the horoscope and the crossword puzzle (which never worked). “It was a terrible business model”, she says now, sitting in the sun outside the South Place Hotel, a stone’s throw from Liverpool Street station. “It would take me hours and I’d sell them for 20p.”

At school she was captain of all the sports teams and ran the disco and the charity, but still ended up in detention. “I’m not very good with rules.” Then one of her teachers told her she stood no chance of getting into Oxbridge. “I hadn’t even thought of it till then. But I was more scrappy than talented, so I applied.” She graduated with a degree in English from Jesus College, Cambridge, in 2008 – bang in the middle of the recession. Not optimal timing.

Golding’s original plan was to become a journalist. She had no difficulty finding “work experience” in the media. She interned at the BBC and FHM magazine. “But nobody wanted to pay me.” So, to make ends meet, she took a variety of jobs: waitress, barista, hairdresser. She sold moisturiser in the aisles at Asda, even for a while worked at Kwik Fit. Perhaps the last straw was when she was rejected for a job as a milkman (there just aren’t that many “milkwomen”). “I needed to find a place where there was not a recession.”

She “worked like a maniac and saved up” and finally took off for Shanghai, where she shared an apartment with five people (“gritty”), picked up enough Chinese to get by, and found a job writing for a local English-language newspaper. She moved on to Australia and Spain but would eventually tire of journalism, mainly because she couldn’t make a decent living out of it. Which explains how she came to switch to banking for Deloitte and finally went into recruitment with Opus Talent Solutions. “I don’t have to wear a suit any more,” she says, with relief.

Golding sees it as a positive advantage not to have a plan in life. “I’m a good example of someone who is curious and wants to work hard, but who doesn’t have a clear path. Most people are like that.” Her basic formula for success is “work hard, see opportunities, be a good person.”

I'm a good example of someone who is curious and wants to work hard, but who doesn't have a clear path – most people are like that

She describes herself as “a chameleon” – and, she adds, “a bit of a comedian too”. Golding argues that you shouldn’t have to lock yourself into a particular career path at an early stage. Her choice of Engish at university was, in effect, “a refusal to choose”. It’s more important to be adaptable. This is why she finds the government’s notion of imposing Stem subjects at school (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) to be too rigid and simplistic. “The rate at which tech is changing is just too fast. You’re instantly out of date. And the idea that you have to get seven-year old girls to choose Stem is only reinforcing the problem. Even if I could rewind the clock 25 years, I still wouldn’t choose it.”

Opus Talent Solutions, founded in 2008, now employs some 130 people and has a £20m turnover, with seven offices in five countries, and is one of the fastest growing companies in the UK. When Amy Golding was made CEO in 2017, she became the youngest ever woman in charge of a $100m company. “No one could have been more surprised than I was.” The Opus mission is to take people who are not “white guys with a science degree” and turn them into potential employees in technology or energy. And then match them to the right company (such as Arcadia, Bentley and Uber). Golding reckons there are 60,000 jobs in these areas in the UK alone (and more like 1.1 million globally), with not enough people to fill them.

Part of the reason for the skills gap is that the word “technology” makes you think of Terminator and Minority Report and robots taking over jobs. Which explains why Golding has come up with a programme called “Nology”. “We’re leaving out the “tech”, which is the scary part of it.” At present, the technology gene pool is 85 per cent white, 85 per cent male, and almost all with a Stem background. “Tech isn’t just for geeks. We’re taking people from all walks of life, with a non-tech background, and teaching them the necessary skills in 12 weeks.”

Golding recently took a DNA test (“you just spit into a tube”) and discovered that she is 15 per cent Scandinavian, but also part-Armenian with a dash of Spanish. And she backs the idea of greater diversity in the contemporary workplace. “We’ve had guys in their forties who studied philosophy, and one girl who had just left school. Musicians are great too – half of music is coding.” The only criterion is that “You’ve got to want it”.