All mums are amazing whether you have had one or ten children (actually more than ten children these days sounds a little neglectful but that is for another blog post) but it is the multiple mums I love to hear from the most. At the moment we are all waiting to hear of the pending birth (false labour starts on the news everyday) of Princess Mary’s twin girls. As an Australian, Princess Mary’s life reads like a fairy tale. I am sure if I really knew her I woud understand her daily life is probably much more challenging than the tabloid reports but I can dream. Meeting her Prince at a pub in Sydney during the Olympics and then a world wind romance, wedding, castles and two babies… So I was delighted to hear the next pregnancy was spontaneous twins. Will she cope with four children under five? So far she looks radiant and healthy and now I can not wait to the magazines of when she comes home with twin girls.

Courtesy of Google.

The other famous mum I confess I love to read about is Angelina Jolie. Besides the fact like Mary she is drop dead gorgeous (do they really look like that ALL the time?) I really do wonder how both these women do it all. We have all heard of Angelina’s huge international brood and I would love to know how she does have the time to spend quality time with all six of her children while she makes movies, travels the work and does all her charity commitments. Maybe I am naive and really both Mary and Angelina have a number of nannies to do the “real” work. Real work as in lack of sleep while attending to babies all night long while wearing a perfectly unsexy nightie or bed time routines of cooking dinner (maybe Brad is the cook), feeding dinner to babies, dinner on floor and all over babies, cleaning floor, bathing babies, and lastly settling babies. For some reason I can not imagine either Mary or Angelina on their hands and knees picking up food scraps thrown from the high chair or negotiating with babies about how much TV they should be watching. But perhaps they do. That is one magazine article and photos I would read.

Courtesy of Google

Last of all the other mums is Australian Westpac CEO Gail Kelly. Ranked the 8th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2010, Gail has four children including Triplet girls. Starting as a teacher and bank teller, this Triplet mum is now the highest paid woman in an Australian corporation. Wow. I love hearing her story because she continued to build a successful career after having Triplets. No, when she had her family she was not famous and no multiples are not the end of the world. Your life does not just stop. If I decided to keep climbing that corporate ladder, I’d like to think of Gail and remind myself that It is OK to pause your career for a few years as there is plenty of time to climb that corporate ladder (if you want too).

Gail Kelly. Photo Courtesy of ABC.

Mrs Kelly says having children taught her the importance of balancing work with other parts of life.

“I really am a huge believer in work-life balance,” she said.

“Practices of flexibility, practices of encouraging people to live whole lives, those are principles for me that I’ve lived and believed in all my life and certainly been the recipient of myself.

“I have four children, three of whom are triplets, and in my life I’ve needed employers who were prepared to back me and provide some flexibility to me during different stages in my career. Reference: Market gives thumbs up to Westpac CEO appointment

Just because you have decided to be a mum, if you want to have a career, you can still do it. Multiples and all.

Moana and Adelaide First Birthday

We made it. We reached the Twins First Birthday milestone and now I am spending a moment to reflect over the last eighteen months. What a year it has been. Little milestones which brings a family together, from pregnancy, to birth, first Christmas, my 30th Birthday, back to work, Christening, moving house and now the First Birthday. Like all families we have the sleepless nights, colds and flus, fussy eaters, developmental concerns, the childcare difficulties and what’s for dinner dilemmas. But now my little babies are turning into little girls.  I have been spending a few nights collating the year in a video montage. To be posted soon…

Thanks for everyone in sharing this with me. xoxo

My Family on the Twins Birthday

I know the importance of business networking. Almost all the jobs I have had has been through my contacts rather than the traditional cold seek and resume applications. That does not mean I enjoy networking events. For the past ten years I have attended a whole suite of them;  AusBiotech, Women in Technology, Queensland State Government small business and technology incubation, etc, etc. But it has been over a year since I dropped out of the networking circuit and after seeing the presentation was my previous employer, I booked in for the Ausbiotech breakfast. Ignoring the fact that a breakfast event is a logistical nightmare (involved staying over my parents the night before, organising babysitters and then late for daycare and work), I really wanted to make the effort to cliché “keep my career alive.”

I wore my best dress. I collected my name badge. Entered the room. Surveyed the groups of suits and high heels. I no longer wear heels. Walked purposefully to the coffee. Poured my cup. Pretended to look busy. I hate these things. Thankfully found the speaker I was here to see to speak to her. Saved. I recognise at least a dozen regulars from my years of networking. However the approach to a group of people sipping tea and entering a conversation is not always a challenge but I get so pissed off when I think I have made the effort (especially when it is someone I have met many times before) but they just look you up and down, make small talk while scanning the room for someone more important to talk too.

Business Networking Challenge

Which brings me to a story of someone I met and was burnt by networking just when I was embarking on my career. To be continued…

As a regular blog segment I wanted to interview mums who have taken control of their career and started a business from home. As I juggle with childcare and full time work, my dream job would be to come up with a great idea or exploit a skill and be my own boss.

Although my degrees are science and technology, I doubt I will be coming up with a new invention or medical breakthrough (although if you have please contact me I would love to hear about it) anytime soon. I have met plenty of professional science and business entrepreneurs but the mum niche market is something different altogether. Over the series of interviews we will discuss challenges, tips and how mums around the world did it.

If you have a question to ask these mums please email me at lisad @ thelastdegree.com or if you would like to register you interest please go to my page “The Rise of the Mum Entrepreneurs.”

Since re-launching my blog and finding new forums and reading some awesome blogs, I have had an itch to learn Photoshop, Illustrator by enrolling in graphic design courses. My main motivation is to learn how to design a wonderful new Theme for my blog and take better photos. The library has a heap of online teach your-self text books but I want to do more. I have always said, “My only VHA (very high achievement) at school was Art and then I enrolled in science.” At the time I could not see a career as an artist and it’s only now do I have a real creative itch to do something. It’s not that I am busy enough but I have been researching what course options I have in Brisbane. There is TAFE, a private college, short courses at Griffith Uni College of Art or the Bachelor Degree of Graphic Art at almost all Universities.

All week I was looking forward to the Griffith University Open day last Sunday to have a look at their courses advertised and I confess we were really disappointed. The agenda advertised, “international food, creative markets by students, galleries, talks and demonstrations.” We got the girls ready in super cute jerseys, packed two single prams, paid for parking and off we went. The “International food” was the canteen, the creative market was one stall with nude art photos and the questions I asked at the design stall was quite depressing. Obviously it was a while since I left high school and when I queried about part-time, they looked at my pram and said I would have to work around childcare. All these parents accompanying their high school children and here I was with two prams. Never felt so out of place. Is uni really only for 18 year olds? I might just look into TAFE or short courses instead.

“You’re the only person in the world who has a folder on your computer hard drive titled Chlamydia,” my sister once said.

Now to get the story straight almost ten years ago I spent a year studying the molecular evidence of Chlamydia affecting our Koala population. It was my graduate science Honours degree and during the project I carried the scientific motivation and fascination for discovering something new although most of the year involved silently trying to spell Chlamydia correctly and pronouncing the species name C.trachomatis without embarrassment.

Now my results are not ground breaking (although I recently searched for my own publication and it has been cited a few times since – Whoopee for bibliometrics) but I did discover and characterise novel uncultured Chlamydiales in Free-Range Koala Populations.

Although I no longer work in the laboratory, I have never been able to capture the same feeling of accomplishment as I did from that project.

What made this project different? Was it:

• The autonomy and problem solving,
• The opportunities to experiment with an idea,
• Having access to skilled and intelligent mentors,
• Strict deadlines which meant late night and weekends in the laboratory to try new experiments, theories and repeat results. Extra hours which for some reason I did not mind doing.
• The meticulous writing up of laboratory notes. Like a Vision diary creative expression is all in your laboratory books and lastly
• The satisfaction of having your results in print.

I often wonder if I should have continued with the curiosity that drives career scientists into a PhD and research. Instead I chose the commercial world. Today I wonder if I had continued on the research trajectory would I have been driven to discover something innovative and groundbreaking or even becoming an expert in my own niche of science and would it have been a more fulfilling career.

So what parts of that project I enjoyed most can I start to replicate again today?

On a final note, not to dampen my achievement in the paper “Molecular evidence for novel chlamydial infections in the koala (Devereaux etal Syst Appl Microbiol. 2003 Jun;26(2):245-53), can you see the different interpretation my father had as he would proudly report in public that his daughter “is named after new species of Chlamydia and had a publication to boot.”?

You spend most of your life at work so its best to find something you enjoy. Hence I am always interested to know how people got their dream job. Over the past fifteen years I have had jobs that helped me get through study, had the graduate jobs, and I have also been fired from a few (or in other words where I did not culturally fit).

Recently I was asked for my advice on how to get that DREAM JOB and this is my practise in action:

• Do an online career assessment. One of the best ones I have seen is based on the theme ‘Fish for your career’, this career test assesses your interest in over 170 occupations to determine the career and area of study that best suits you. Find your ideal career with this popular online career assessment.

Take control of your career and put it into action every day.

Set up daily FREE email searches on Seek.com.au

This is how. Set up an account with seek.com.au (Australia’s no 1 job search engine or find equivalent overseas) and list all the dream job titles you want in the keywords. This strategy is not necessarily to apply for the jobs but to research and read the advertisements.

What it teaches you is:

• Where the jobs are (interstate, local, overseas etc).
• What is the demand for these jobs or skills? For an example is there a high need for people with these skills (represented by a lot of advertisements) or only a few?
• Are they permanent roles or cyclical, more casual and part-time or contract or consultancy preferred.
• What companies recruit these people? So you can do research on the companies, and even approach them for work experience? Get to know the companies! Especially for industry knowledge and competition in the market and if you ever meet people from these companies you will have something to talk about.
• What are the salary scales for junior entry to senior roles.
• Selection criteria! What do I need to do to get the skills required for these kinds of roles? And then integrate them into your career plan. If you are lacking in one key skill that a lot of advertisement ask for you know that is what you have to do so you can apply.

This is not a quick fix as it takes time to understand a particular job and industry market. I have been doing this for years since I worked in recruitment back in 2003.

Even though I have a good job now I still receive the Seek emails every day for keywords I am interested in like technology commercialisation and business development. It is always good to be up-to date in the market and know who is employing who. Keep your network up to date so you know where people leave jobs and where they are going too (i.e. Linked-in is good for that).  It will take some time but worth the effort.