Become the candidate everyone wants

Monique Stoltz was flat broke after travelling abroad when she scored an entry-level position in the laboratory at her local pulp mill. She soon gained all the skills of an industrial chemist, just not the piece of paper to prove it.

Stoltz already had an undergraduate degree in psychology but, after working her way up in the mill, she had a decision to make. Should she do a degree in chemical engineering and make it official? Return to her counselling aspirations? Or start again elsewhere? 

Then came her ‘sliding doors’ moment. A personal experience with Australia’s legal system that affected someone close to her, tempted her to try her hand at something completely new – a career in law, and with it, a chance to help people. 

“That tied in with a lot of my aspirations,” she said. “As long as [I] was helping individuals navigate something difficult in the community, it just felt like a good use of my time.”

After receiving a scholarship with Macquarie University, Stoltz embarked on a Juris Doctor, a graduate-entry degree aimed at preparing individuals to practise law. 

It opened up entirely new career opportunities for her, something Helen Liossis also discovered when she returned to university to study a Master of Business Administration (MBA).

Liossis had been working in strategy with Telstra back in the early noughties when she realised her options would be limited without extra study.

“When I spoke to senior people in strategy roles, within different organisations, their advice to me was always ‘you won’t be taken seriously in strategy unless you’ve completed an MBA’,” Liossis told FW.

She had a Bachelor of Business, was a practising accountant and had held high level corporate jobs. But she sensed the “next logical stage for [her] professional development” was to quit work and complete the MBA within a year.

When she finished, her existing experience coupled with her new post graduate degree quickly landed her a strategic role with a large listed company.

“In terms of what it meant for me, [it] was not just getting those strategy roles but unless I’d done that MBA, I wouldn’t have been able to pivot into those different industries the way I did,” she said. 

By continuing her studies, Liossis had also future-proofed her career.

Postgrad the ‘intelligence’ pathway

Sibel Aktim also understands the importance of upskilling. She works in intelligence for the government but cannot reveal exactly which department she works for. She’s also heard all the jokes about her industry.

“Look, I’m still waiting for my lipstick taser to come through,” she joked to FW.

An interest in analytics and critical thinking is what drew Aktim to her chosen career. But it was the extra elements of her new Master of Intelligence that sealed her love for her work.

“In my first semester of my master’s, I just thought, yes, this is definitely what I want to do. But in addition to that, I think I was very lucky in my postgraduate [course] to do a US study tour,” she said.

“I don’t know if I would have appreciated law as much as an undergrad. I think I really needed some life experience to really engage with the systems.” 

As part of the tour the students worked with the University of Maryland within its counterterrorism area. 

“We’re able to do simulation work within, like a CT [counter terrorism] environment, listen to people from the US, within that of the ‘five eyes’ community, to learn from them,” she said. 

“[I] spoke to so many directors and intelligence practitioners, investigators that were working in the US, within their respective agencies, people from the FBI, the CIA, like you name it. They were all there.”

As for Aktim’s day to day job, she describes it as “putting the pieces of the puzzle together”.

“It’s not about telling the audience or the decision maker what they already know,” she said. “It’s about telling them what they don’t know, adding that value to them so that they, in turn, are able to make a decision.”

For Stoltz, the decision to switch her career to law also flipped her life. She is now the Legal Support Coordinator for Wallumatta Legal, a low fee, not-for-profit, family law firm that caters to low and middle income clients.

“We try to provide services for the ‘missing middle’ – so it’s actually an exorbitant percentage, because it’s the people who cannot access legal aid, but they’re also not in the income bracket to then go to a private firm,” she said. 

She derives much meaning from her legal work but says she’s glad she didn’t jump into it immediately after her undergraduate studies.

“I don’t know if I would have appreciated law as much as an undergrad. I think I really needed some life experience to really engage with the systems that we have in place, to see the ways that they are working, but also the ways that they can improve.” 

Liossis can relate. 

“My advice to people is don’t do [an MBA] too early. Do it when you’ve got the capacity,” she said.

Aktim believes expanding your skillset is an opportunity in itself, with her studies broadening her career horizons beyond the intelligence community.  

“Even if you’re not working in government doing an intelligence job, you can still have a great impact within a private organisation,” she said.

 “It’s such a unique area which can touch so many places within the job market that you can really make yourself marketable anywhere.”