The Story — Chinonso Anatune

Chapter one

The decision nobody expected

At eighteen, everyone around him was applying for the same thing, in the same way, at the same time. St Olave's is the kind of school where the route is assumed rather than discussed, and questioning it out loud takes a certain nerve.

Chinonso asked the harder question anyway. Not "where does everyone go", but "what actually fits me". The honest answer was an apprenticeship. To a lot of people that looked like stepping off the ladder. He understood it as stepping onto a different one, and that knowing the difference was the entire point.

Chinonso at a careers and further education event

Where it started

Chapter two

Learning the business from the inside

He joined Schroders as an apprentice and moved through multiple placements across IT. While others were still theorising about careers from a lecture hall, he was inside a global asset manager, doing real work that real people depended on.

He learned how a serious organisation actually runs, earned his Azure, ITIL v4 and ServiceNow certifications, and finished the apprenticeship with a merit. No debt, no guessing, just two years of steadily building proof that he had backed himself correctly.

Chinonso networking at an industry event

Inside the industry

Chapter three

The first time he picked up the mic

Through Investment 20/20 he started volunteering at events and speaking in schools, telling students the thing he wished someone had told him at their age. That the route is not fixed. That self-awareness beats certainty. That not knowing yet is allowed.

The first talk was nerve-wracking. He was barely older than the students in front of him, and that turned out to be the point. They listened because he was not lecturing from the far side of a long career, he was reporting back from just up the road. He watched the room lean in, and understood this was something he was meant to do.

Chinonso mentoring students at a school event

First rooms

Chapter four

A seat at Rothschild & Co

The route some assumed would hold him back is the one that carried him forward. Today he is an EUC Analyst at Rothschild & Co, at twenty-one, in a building most people imagine you can only reach one way.

He is living proof of the argument he makes on stage, and he is careful about how he tells it. This is not a story about luck, or about being the exception. It is a story about choosing yourself before the world tells you who to be, and it is repeatable. That is exactly why he tells it.

Proof on stage

Chapter five

Why he speaks now

Somewhere right now there is a student being handed one version of the future, who has never once been told there is another. Some of them will quietly decide they are not the type for a room like the one Chinonso now works in, long before anyone gives them a reason to think otherwise.

He speaks so that fewer young people rule themselves out of a life they cannot yet picture. Schools, universities and employers bring him in for exactly that, to widen what a room full of young people believe is available to them, using a story they can genuinely see themselves inside.

Chinonso speaking to a large audience of young people

The mission

From a school desk to a seat at the table.

The decision nobody expected

Learning the business from the inside

The first time he picked up the mic

A seat at Rothschild & Co

Why he speaks now

Give your students this story.