Upskill one subject at a time

Nessá Pastoors isn’t one to stand still. As a human resources manager at Merri Health, she studied a Master of Employment Relations to solidify her knowledge and broaden her career prospects. Pastoors completed her master’s degree online with Griffith University through Open Universities Australia (OUA), after starting it at another university. “I found it easier to finish off the degree online through OUA because I couldn’t afford not to work full-time,” she says. “I got credits for the subjects I’d already done on campus.” But Pastoors’s pursuit of education didn’t stop there. She went on to study an Executive MBA from RMIT University, also online through OUA. “I started that when my son was eight weeks old,” she says. Pastoors wasn’t the primary carer but as any parent knows, new babies are a lot of work. “I’m in a same-sex relationship and my partner carried our son. She said I should go ahead with the MBA as she was going to take a year off anyway and we’d make it work.” Pastoors decided to start with just one subject “because I was juggling full-time work and being a new mum. I found that doing one subject at a time was what I needed to do to pace myself. Then I got pregnant with Willow two-and-a-half years later.” Back at work after her maternity leave, Pastoors returned to studying her MBA online and was promoted to General Manager of People and Communications. She attributes her success to the fact that she was clearly “willing to go the extra mile” to further her professional development, as well as the proposal she presented, developed using newly acquired knowledge from her MBA studies.