There is something surreal about standing at the front of a classroom you were sitting in only months earlier.
Earlier that year, I had finished at Preston College. By the time I returned, I was living in Germany, building automation systems and product experiments at Knowunity, and trying to keep pace with how quickly my work was changing. The physical journey was familiar. The perspective was not.
Preston College invited me back to speak with current students about getting into technology early, entrepreneurship and what the move from education into real responsibility had actually looked like. I did not return as someone with a perfectly resolved career story. That was exactly why the conversations worked.
The distance was short enough to be useful
Students hear plenty of success stories. The problem is that many arrive after years of editing. The wrong turns have been removed, the uncertainty has been turned into a lesson, and the person telling the story can make every decision sound more deliberate than it felt at the time.
I was not far enough away to do that. I could still remember the exact tension between coursework, applications, side projects and trying to work out what counted as “enough” experience. The students did not have to imagine how somebody with a long career might have started. They could ask somebody who had been in their seat months earlier.
Near-peer advice works because the route is still close enough to look possible.
That closeness changes the questions. Instead of asking what the industry might be like one day, students could ask what I did this week, how I got my first opportunity, what I struggled with and what I would do differently if I were back at college.
Getting a foot in the door starts before the job
One of the sessions focused on getting started early. That does not mean every student needs a job at 16, and it definitely does not mean rushing past education. It means recognising that experience can begin before someone gives you a formal title.
My route into Knowunity began as a student ambassador. I used the product, tested features, raised problems and looked for useful ways to contribute. That created evidence: not evidence that I already knew everything, but evidence that I was curious, reliable and willing to act. The first part-time role grew out of that.
The practical advice was simple. Make something small. Volunteer for the problem nobody has claimed. Ask a precise question. Show your work. Follow up. None of those steps guarantees an opportunity, but together they make it much easier for somebody to understand what you could become.
The basics matter when you push beyond them
I also talked about going beyond the minimum expected by a course. That phrase can sound dismissive of formal education, but I mean almost the opposite. College gave me a foundation across programming, IT systems and project work. Pushing beyond the syllabus meant finding places to apply that foundation while I still had tutors, classmates and structure around me.
Preston gave me more than lessons. I was a scholarship student, represented learners and the IT programme, became a student ambassador, completed an industry placement and joined competitions. In one of those competitions, our team won first place in the Lancashire Colleges Level 4 Digital Skills Competition while competing against university students.
Those experiences did not sit outside the education. They made the education real. A concept behaves differently when it has to survive a deadline, a team disagreement, an external audience or a result you cannot negotiate with.
The students became the experts in the room
The best part of returning was not the presentation. It was putting Knowunity into the students’ hands.
They explored the app, tested features and said what they actually thought. The feedback was sharp because they did not need to pretend to be the target audience; they were the target audience. They noticed friction an internal team could easily learn to ignore and asked questions that exposed assumptions beneath the interface.
That changed the dynamic of the session. I could offer experience about finding opportunities, but they had experience I needed as a builder. The classroom was not a one-way transfer from speaker to students. It became a feedback loop between education and the product trying to support it.
It was also a reminder that “student voice” becomes much more valuable when students can respond to something concrete. A working product gives them something to challenge. Specific interactions produce specific observations. If you want young people to shape technology made for them, show them the thing early enough that their response can still change it.
A prospectus captures one moment in a moving story
Preston College later included me as an alumni profile in its 2026–27 prospectus, on the Media, IT & Digital Technology spread. It records the route from Level 3 ICT Practitioner to employment at Knowunity in Germany, alongside the scholarship, student ambassador work, industry placement and skills competition that helped shape it.
Seeing that page was strange in a different way. Prospectuses are designed for people deciding what might come next. Not long ago, I was one of those people reading course descriptions and trying to imagine where a choice could lead. Now a small part of my path is being used to make one of those possibilities visible to somebody else.
The profile is not a finished biography. It is a snapshot from early in the journey. That makes it more useful. Students do not only need distant examples of where a career can end. They need visible first steps: the course, the placement, the competition, the first responsibility and the decision to keep going.
Going back made the foundation clearer
Moving quickly can make every chapter feel temporary. You finish one project and begin another; a new role absorbs the lessons from the last one; a move to another country makes the previous routine feel much further away than it is.
Returning to Preston interrupted that momentum long enough to see the foundation properly. The technical skills mattered. So did the staff who treated ambition seriously, the opportunities to represent other students, the chance to compete and the confidence that came from being trusted before the outcome was certain.
I went back expecting to share what I had learned since leaving. I left with better product feedback, a stronger sense of what the college had given me and a reminder that progress becomes more meaningful when it creates a route somebody else can see.
To the students from those sessions: keep building, keep asking precise questions and use every opportunity around you. You do not need to have the whole route planned. You need a first step you can take seriously.