Chinonso Anatune
Chinonso Anatune is twenty-one, and he already understands something most people spend a decade learning. That the path everyone points you toward is not the only one that leads somewhere worth going.
He grew up inside a system built to produce one particular kind of success. St Olave's Grammar School is selective, high-achieving, and quietly clear about where its students are meant to end up. He came out of it in 2022 with A Levels in History, Religious Studies and Maths, and every door to the traditional route wide open. Then he did the thing almost nobody around him expected. He chose an apprenticeship instead.
At a school like that, the apprenticeship route is not the easy option. It means explaining yourself to people who assume you have made a mistake. It means trusting your own read on who you are over the script you are handed at eighteen. He made that call because he had done the harder work first, the work of actually knowing himself, and self-awareness told him this was his route, not theirs.
He joined Schroders as an apprentice and learned the business the way you only can from the inside, moving through multiple placements across IT while a lot of his peers were still deciding what they wanted to be. He finished his Level 3 with a merit and stacked up his Azure Fundamentals, ITIL v4 and ServiceNow Fundamentals certifications along the way. Proof, quietly accumulating, that the decision had been the right one.
Then something he had not planned for took hold. Through Investment 20/20 he began volunteering at events and standing up in schools, telling young people the truth he wished someone had told him: that growth is not linear, that you do not need it all figured out at eighteen, that there is more than one door. The first time was nerve-wracking. Then he watched a room of teenagers lean in, and realised this mattered to him as much as anything on his CV.
Today he is an EUC Analyst at Rothschild & Co, at twenty-one, living proof of the argument he makes on stage. Away from work he is a former sprinter, once trained by Olympian Adam Gemili, which is where the discipline and the calm under pressure were built. He reads, he travels, and he still suffers for Arsenal. But one thread runs through all of it. He is genuinely passionate about early careers and apprenticeships, because the route that changed his life is the one nobody told him about, and he does not want the next young person to miss it.
