Transcript

BARBARA

Networks have been useful to me, but for a long time I didn't realise that what I was doing by keeping in touch with ex-colleagues was me networking. It seems to have been a term that's used more now, and now I know what it means, I can identify with what I did.

But at various stages of my life, I've always kept in touch with people I've worked with. I kept in touch with people I did my PhD alongside at Strathclyde, and I'm now working with those people again now, coincidentally. I've kept in touch with people I worked with when I was involved in consultancy prior to the career break, and I'm still in touch with those people now and sometimes working for them. Again, the Open University returners course opened another network of people and another network of information through those similar types of people to myself that could then make me aware of potential opportunities as they arose in the future.

And when I was working for Edinburgh Napier under my Daphne Jackson Fellowship, I set up a network of the Scottish Fellows at the time, and we all met up in Edinburgh a couple of times, had coffee, got to know each other a bit. And I'm still in touch with some of those other returners, so we have our own network of people who've been in similar positions that can help us hopefully in the future if we need to know things, or we'll keep each other informed of potential opportunities.