How Rach Ranton went from army veteran to TED speaker before 40.

"Whose life is this?"

The question hovered silently in the air for Rach Ranton as she walked up to the New York TED stage in 2017 after soaking in the atmosphere all day, waiting to give her game-changing talk about leadership. 

When Rach joined the defence force at 17, she was just looking for a way to level up her small-town upbringing for a life of adventure. What she didn’t know at the time was just how much the army would reveal about who she was and what she was capable of. 

And let me tell you, speaking to this woman, you’d be hard-pressed to find something she’s not capable of. Actually, that’s not quite true. She’s rubbish at skateboarding and she can’t sing to save her life.

Now, at 45, Rach has built a multifaceted identity. She’s a TED speaker, an author, a decorated army vet, a mother, a postgraduate student at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) — and the recipient of too many accolades to count, including the 2018 Prime Minister’s Veteran Employee of the Year award. In her work with Westpac, she even designed, developed, and implemented an Autism hiring program which she has since gone on to share with other organisations worldwide. So, how did she do it all?

Joining the army at 17.

"When you join the army, they basically run you through a series of tests, just to find out what you have a natural inclination to be good at," says Rach, "And after my tests, they offered me this unreal job, they basically told me it was top secret and it gets paid more than anyone else,” she laughs. "I mean, I was 17. I went, ‘Yeah, bro, that sounds amazing!' It's called electronic warfare. And basically, it's understanding how signals work in the environment, how they travel around, how people communicate."

During her ten years of service, Rach learned just how important it is to back yourself, every move you make. She credits a string of incredible leaders in the defence force for instilling this in her from a young age. "They just really backed me to do it," she says, "Regardless of gender — I was a tiny, little human at the time — but they just went, ‘Yeah, you could do it. We've seen you do it. We know you can do it. Off you go!'"

It was with that well-earned confidence that after a decade in the defence force, with a five-year-old to think about, the time felt right to move on. "My husband and I were both serving, and it was time to think about maybe one of us having a sensible job," she says about the choice to leave the army. 

So, being the relentlessly logical person she is, Rach simply asked, "'Okay what sort of things was I interested in at school?' It was all sort of maths and data and accounting and those sorts of things and so I went, ‘Okay I'll see if I can join a bank.'"

From soldier to bank manager.

After a classic resume drop to all the major banks, Rach scored some interviews and was soon offered a branch management role with St. George Bank in the Westpac group. "I’d been in the army for a good decade, I had no undergrad, but they were willing to take a chance on a leader,” she explains. "They were prepared to take a risk on someone with leadership but no banking experience to speak of. They said, ‘Ah, we'll just teach you that’ so that was that!" she says. 

Back to study in her thirties.

Rach was moving quickly up the ladder, but it soon became obvious something was missing. "I realised I was able to learn a heap on the job, but there were technical things, there was stuff I didn't know that I felt was a gap between me and existing people who'd spent their whole career in the bank," she says. "I knew that to be competitive, I needed both the runs on the board in terms of performance, but also the qualifications to back that up so that someone would support me to continue to go up the ladder."

So, in her mid-thirties, after testing the waters with a Grad Cert in Business, she returned to complete her MBA at UniSQ. But like everything else in her life to date, it was so much more than she expected.

"At first, in my mind, I thought of it as an exercise in ticking a box. I thought, yes, I'll get you that piece of paper, you know? But the great thing was, UniSQ recognised that I'd already been working in a leadership role, both in the army and at the bank for a combined seven years, and I was able to go straight into a postgrad," she says.

UniSQ offers 80 different study disciplines and more than 220 postgraduate specialisations, everything from agriculture to astrophysics. And with an entirely online offering, Rach was able to tailor her study to suit her busy lifestyle. 

“The flexibility that you've got studying online — if two subjects were too much in the first semester, you can do it one at a time. If you felt like that was easy, you can pick up three or four. I worked full-time, and at times I studied a full-time load, but I was able to change it up as needed. The fact that it was online was just unreal, and meant I could work it around what I needed to do.”

More than just a degree.

Studying at UniSQ was a perfect fit for Rach, thanks in large part to their focus on real-world application of specialised knowledge. "It definitely helped me understand again, not just about my learning style, but about like, what am I really good at? It expanded my thinking in those subjects. It let me be less in the weeds of running the operational business and helped elevate my strategic thinking," says Rach. 

"My biggest piece of advice would be to take on the opportunities and the study that you think you probably won't have time for, you'll find a way to make that work."

In the two years after graduating with an MBA in 2016, Rach continued up the ranks at the Westpac Group, only to be selected by TED New York as one of 12 speakers from Westpac’s 40,000 staff to give her unique take on leadership.

Image: Supplied.

The thing about Rach is that underpinning every achievement is an unshakable sense of purpose and self. It’s a zealous drive for authenticity and the courage to let her heart guide her to where she needs to be, and with her son, now turning 22 and all moved out, she’s ready to see what the next phase of her life will bring.

If you ask Rach how she’s managed to achieve all she has in such a short space of time, she’ll tell you, "I'm just a regular, everyday person. I'm not naturally talented at lots of stuff. I'm happy to grind and just do a bunch of work. But if you keep walking through doors and you keep saying yes to things you think you can’t do, the opportunities will come and they just get crazier and crazier."

Explore ways to upskill or change careers with a UniSQ postgraduate degree.

Feature Image: Rach Ranton.