Kathy A. found her "dream job" teaching management information systems to business students on a casual summer walk with an old friend she hadn't seen for 10 years. "It was really just a fluke," recalled Kathy, who was laid off in fall 2001 after years of working as a program manager and technology trainer in consulting services. Kathy and her husband were staying in Los Gatos caring for a sick relative when she thought of looking up his graduate thesis advisor who lived nearby. Knowing that he had worked for National Semiconductor for years, she planned to use the opportunity to network and check if he had any industry contacts in technology companies she was interested in working for.

As it turned out, her friend had long since left the high-tech industry for academia and currently served as chairman of the Management Information Systems Department at a Bay Area university's School of Business. To Kathy's amazement, he asked her point blank, "How would you like to come to work for me at the university?" With just two months before the start of the fall semester, he needed to fill a teaching vacancy quickly and remembered that she had a background in technology training.

Kathy has an undergraduate degree in education and an M.B.A., but she always assumed that she couldn't teach at the college level because she didn't have a Ph.D. "It's like my dream job, but I never dreamed it because I never even thought it was available to me," she conceded. What she did know is that she was burnt out with the high-tech grind and had been dragging her feet searching for a new job since she hadn't clarified in her mind what exactly she was looking for.

Having embarked on a new career path, Kathy couldn't be happier with her new teaching position. "Everything feels so right about it," she said. "My apprehensions are that I'm not sure that I'm qualified. I'll try and get over that by preparing hard. I'm already preparing lessons."

As EU Oakland's departing co-director for training, Kathy has a message for job-searching professionals. "The message I want to get across to people is: first, don't limit your options. Secondly, every contact really could be a networking contact. He certainly wasn't on my list of people to call."