A returning mother discusses the barriers she faced going back to work, including assumptions about her abilities and the scarcity of part-time roles. She completed an Advanced Diploma in Treasury Corporate Finance to rebuild her career after time away.
Who just kind of assumed that, you know, as a returning mother, A, you probably wouldn't be able to hack it and B, you know, you haven't got, you haven't done this and you haven't done that instead of sort of looking at you in the round and going, she must be quite tough to already done some exams with a new baby and she really, really wants to go down this route. And also something which is quite dear to my heart is that returning mothers mostly don't have the capacity and don't want to work completely full time, put all that into the package and actually go and talk to a recruiter about part time and etc. In a new field and it doesn't stack up to instant job offer on the returning mother's piece. I mean, from my perspective at that period, I was probably quite a tricky candidate to place because I genuinely hadn't been doing some of this stuff, you know, in the previous 10 years and I understood that. But I think if you're talking about somebody who does not necessarily returning mother, it could be somebody else from our society who wants to sort their life in a different way. I think that with a bit of thought you could easily organize a Monday to Wednesday and then a Wednesday to Friday with an overlap on Wednesday or whatever to make job share or part time possible. But you just have to get organized. Yeah, at that point it was, it was a tricky nuts crack. And I happened on cochlear, who you mentioned in your opening session, is a super company, a cochlear implant company, Australian company, and the CFO there, David Ashton, saw my CV dropped on his desk and he said, oh, I could employ her. And indeed I did end up with a Treasury manager role which was less than full time and on and off. I did that over the next four years and it was a really, really good period because I was able to sort of combine all those elements in what I wanted to do at that time in my life. I've taken loads and loads of exams in my life, but I'm looking at it right now in my work room at home. But it's the only certificate I've got on my wall so that maybe that puts it in context. Got a university degree, I did chartered accountancy, I've got the certificate somewhere, did my associate exams at the act, but it's the mct, it's in a gold frame behind my computer screen right in front of me. And it is the course that was, I mean, sort of over the years the course has changed a bit. But the course that I completed in 2012 is actually called an Advanced Diploma. I'm reading off the certificate, Advanced Diploma in Treasury Corporate Finance, which you all know very well. Mike, lots of people in the UK who've done this and some further afield out it was a 13 months pretty well full time. There weren't really very many fire breaks in the course, multi modular course of study. So a mixture of case studies, really meaty case studies with quite a lot of Excel and write up etc. And plus exams, plus quite a long project I wrote on a cash on the balance sheet theme for that. A very, very satisfying course to have done. Very well organised, super tutors. Quite a lot of it's done online with a tutorial. I think the shaping thing about doing the mct, apart from being incredibly loads and loads of hard work and I'm not selling it very well, people are saying, oh, I wouldn't want to do that, but it's very satisfying when you've done it, is that, you know, your roundedness in understanding the corporate finance piece for a company, how the companies work was massively strengthened by doing this course. It wasn't just about treasury, you know, it's much, much broader than that. I could say I wish I'd done it years ago, but in a sense it's one of those things where a little bit of maturity and distance is also quite helpful.
