Phil Beard has had a successful international career as a stockbroker working in the City of London.
Before that he was one of Australia’s leading finance journalists working in London as an overseas correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.
He is an alum of Heatherhill High School (now Keysborough College), in Melbourne’s outer east. Class of 1972.
What were your favorite subjects at high school and why?
PB: Economics and social science. We were lucky, because we were one of the first suburban high schools in Victoria to have economics and social science offered as subjects. Australian history and literature were also favourite subjects.
What was so good about studying economics in high school?
PB: We had a lot of teachers who’d been fast-tracked into teaching and had studied overseas. Alec Robbins, my economics teacher, had been to Canada and had seen how they taught economics in high schools in Canada.
Your parents migrated to Australia in the 1960s. Were you the first in your immediate family to go to university?
PB: Yes, not just my immediate family. I’d say all my family, even going back generations in the UK.
What did you do once you graduated from Heatherhill High School?
PB: Only a handful of my Sixth Form went on to university. I went to Monash Uni to do an Economics and Law degree, which was to take five years.
After three years, I’d secured the economics part of the degree, so I took a gap year, travelled around England and around Europe. And then I came back to earn some money to get me through the last two years of university to complete my law degree.
On the way to a fill in job in a greeting card company I bumped into a teammate from my cricket club who was installing computers at the Herald and Weekly Times – then Australia’s largest newspaper company. It published the Sun News-Pictorial, which sold 650,000 copies every morning.
I had always fancied journalism, but I had no idea how you got into it. I loved the idea of working for the Sun because my family were always readers of the paper.
And as it turned out, one of the big names in the Sun’s finance section was crossing town to work at the paper’s rival, the Age, leaving the Sun shorthanded. The Sun decided it needed a cadet, or trainee, journalist in the finance section.
I applied for that position and luckily enough I got it. Because I’d done economics, the people at the Sun thought that approximated to me being knowledgeable about finance.
In many ways economics and finance are miles apart but luckily for me it was good enough for The Sun. It was a great stroke of luck because graduate cadets tended to be put into specialised posts, as management tended to prefer training their own cadets.
You rose quickly through the ranks as a finance journalist, eventually working in London as the Australian Financial Review’s London correspondent. Then you left journalist and became a stockbroker in the City of London.
PB: After a couple of years in finance at the Sun, which included a spell on police rounds, I was posted to the Canberra bureau as economics correspondent for the group. From there I went to Sydney where The Australian was expanding its finance section with a guy called David Koch who went on to have a massive career in morning TV.
In the Eighties the introduction of new technology meant newspapers had money to invest and The Australian decided it needed a European business correspondent.
I got that job, based in London, and after a while I moved to the Australian Financial Review to do the same thing. Eventually, that came to an end when the new editor of the Financial Review, Alan Kohler, wanted to bring me back to Melbourne and I couldn’t see much point in that.
Fortunately for me, this came not that long after the so-called Big Bang, when the Thatcher government deregulated the financial markets, sparking much greater activity on the London stock exchange.
There was a shortage of people with a good, broad working understanding of finance. As a journalist, I’d developed that, so I was part of a group of journalists who went from journalism into stockbroking, or as a mate jokingly described it, from face up to face down in the career gutter.
You’ve had two very successful careers, one in journalism and one in finance, operating at an international level in both. How do you think your state high school education contributed to your success as a journalist and then as a stockbroker?
The great thing about high school was you weren’t spoon fed. My education gave me the ability to get on with people with different backstories. Navigating the school yard in high school wasn’t always easy, which proved great preparation for what was to come.
It’s really good training for what life is actually like, rather than experiencing the sort of rarefied world that the people I first met at university came from. I think that was the biggest thing. It was actually a pretty good education in life skills.
You’ve lived and worked in London for decades now. So, what inspired you to become a donor to Ourschool?
PB: I caught up with a mate of mine from high school who reached out to me on Facebook, and she told me about Ourschool. It led me to think about how there was a general feeling at school that because you went to a high school, your horizons were necessarily limited, and life might be just our part of Melbourne and getting a job in Springvale or Dandenong.
If that’s what you want, that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to be that. I remember when we used to learn French because we had to and the thinking was ‘Why do we need to learn French? When will we ever use that?’ To me, that’s what kids shouldn’t think. Kids should think the world can be anything, and the school should inspire them to think that.
That’s why I got involved with Ourschool, because talking to Deb, my high school friend, it reminded me what I thought about the world as a kid, what we thought school was, and how it shouldn’t be like that.
Do you think alumni programs for state high schools can broaden horizons for kids beyond their immediate neighborhood and family?
PB: For sure. Looking back at high school, I had some teachers who probably indulged me because if you were interested in the world, they were happy to engage with you.
We were lucky. The teachers we had were young. They were, I think, still a little bit idealistic. They never tried to block us. They were happy to give up their own time after school to help you.
Going back to Alec Robbins, he wasn’t just an economics teacher. He gave me confidence in myself. He turned me into a runner, a sprinter. He showed me how you can develop an air of confidence, even if you didn’t have it.
Phil Beard has had a successful international career as a stockbroker working in the City of London.
Before that he was one of Australia’s leading finance journalists working in London as an overseas correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.
He is an alum of Heatherhill High School (now Keysborough College), in Melbourne’s outer east. Class of 1972.
What were your favorite subjects at high school and why?
PB: Economics and social science. We were lucky, because we were one of the first suburban high schools in Victoria to have economics and social science offered as subjects. Australian history and literature were also favourite subjects.
What was so good about studying economics in high school?
PB: We had a lot of teachers who’d been fast-tracked into teaching and had studied overseas. Alec Robbins, my economics teacher, had been to Canada and had seen how they taught economics in high schools in Canada.
Your parents migrated to Australia in the 1960s. Were you the first in your immediate family to go to university?
PB: Yes, not just my immediate family. I’d say all my family, even going back generations in the UK.
What did you do once you graduated from Heatherhill High School?
PB: Only a handful of my Sixth Form went on to university. I went to Monash Uni to do an Economics and Law degree, which was to take five years.
After three years, I’d secured the economics part of the degree, so I took a gap year, travelled around England and around Europe. And then I came back to earn some money to get me through the last two years of university to complete my law degree.
On the way to a fill in job in a greeting card company I bumped into a teammate from my cricket club who was installing computers at the Herald and Weekly Times – then Australia’s largest newspaper company. It published the Sun News-Pictorial, which sold 650,000 copies every morning.
I had always fancied journalism, but I had no idea how you got into it. I loved the idea of working for the Sun because my family were always readers of the paper.
And as it turned out, one of the big names in the Sun’s finance section was crossing town to work at the paper’s rival, the Age, leaving the Sun shorthanded. The Sun decided it needed a cadet, or trainee, journalist in the finance section.
I applied for that position and luckily enough I got it. Because I’d done economics, the people at the Sun thought that approximated to me being knowledgeable about finance.
In many ways economics and finance are miles apart but luckily for me it was good enough for The Sun. It was a great stroke of luck because graduate cadets tended to be put into specialised posts, as management tended to prefer training their own cadets.
You rose quickly through the ranks as a finance journalist, eventually working in London as the Australian Financial Review’s London correspondent. Then you left journalist and became a stockbroker in the City of London.
PB: After a couple of years in finance at the Sun, which included a spell on police rounds, I was posted to the Canberra bureau as economics correspondent for the group. From there I went to Sydney where The Australian was expanding its finance section with a guy called David Koch who went on to have a massive career in morning TV.
In the Eighties the introduction of new technology meant newspapers had money to invest and The Australian decided it needed a European business correspondent.
I got that job, based in London, and after a while I moved to the Australian Financial Review to do the same thing. Eventually, that came to an end when the new editor of the Financial Review, Alan Kohler, wanted to bring me back to Melbourne and I couldn’t see much point in that.
Fortunately for me, this came not that long after the so-called Big Bang, when the Thatcher government deregulated the financial markets, sparking much greater activity on the London stock exchange.
There was a shortage of people with a good, broad working understanding of finance. As a journalist, I’d developed that, so I was part of a group of journalists who went from journalism into stockbroking, or as a mate jokingly described it, from face up to face down in the career gutter.
You’ve had two very successful careers, one in journalism and one in finance, operating at an international level in both. How do you think your state high school education contributed to your success as a journalist and then as a stockbroker?
The great thing about high school was you weren’t spoon fed. My education gave me the ability to get on with people with different backstories. Navigating the school yard in high school wasn’t always easy, which proved great preparation for what was to come.
It’s really good training for what life is actually like, rather than experiencing the sort of rarefied world that the people I first met at university came from. I think that was the biggest thing. It was actually a pretty good education in life skills.
You’ve lived and worked in London for decades now. So, what inspired you to become a donor to Ourschool?
PB: I caught up with a mate of mine from high school who reached out to me on Facebook, and she told me about Ourschool. It led me to think about how there was a general feeling at school that because you went to a high school, your horizons were necessarily limited, and life might be just our part of Melbourne and getting a job in Springvale or Dandenong.
If that’s what you want, that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to be that. I remember when we used to learn French because we had to and the thinking was ‘Why do we need to learn French? When will we ever use that?’ To me, that’s what kids shouldn’t think. Kids should think the world can be anything, and the school should inspire them to think that.
That’s why I got involved with Ourschool, because talking to Deb, my high school friend, it reminded me what I thought about the world as a kid, what we thought school was, and how it shouldn’t be like that.
Do you think alumni programs for state high schools can broaden horizons for kids beyond their immediate neighborhood and family?
PB: For sure. Looking back at high school, I had some teachers who probably indulged me because if you were interested in the world, they were happy to engage with you.
We were lucky. The teachers we had were young. They were, I think, still a little bit idealistic. They never tried to block us. They were happy to give up their own time after school to help you.
Going back to Alec Robbins, he wasn’t just an economics teacher. He gave me confidence in myself. He turned me into a runner, a sprinter. He showed me how you can develop an air of confidence, even if you didn’t have it.