Bernadette, a 1968 baby, was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, but left in 1985 to work with mentally and physically handicapped children and adults in England. After a couple of years she gave into the travel bug and headed overseas where she did a host of jobs in France including picking grapes, working on luxury yachts, and hoovering swimming pools!

Upon returning to the UK, Bernadette set up a care consultancy to look after spinally-injured adults and provided emergency relief care all over the UK. A year and a half later, and tired of living out of a suitcase, she discovered the world of retail management and was happily paid to talk to people, working for the likes of Laura Ashley and Whittard of Chelsea and becoming the resident coffee expert on a local cable TV network.

Bitten by the travel bug once again, Bernadette spent a season delivering yachts from France to Greece and working on a converted trawler in Scotland. This resulted in the dubious achievement of being the only female preparing the boat for sea at one of the oldest Glasgow shipyards!

1994 saw her land in Australia for a year and working with boats yet again -- this time on a Junk -- teaching people to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef off Port Douglas in Queensland. A year later she was in Hong Kong and slipped easily into corporate life, initially in management with the Pacific Coffee Group and later in the recruitment industry where she has found her calling and can put to use her overactive curiosity in people.

Working with the Korn/Ferry Group at Futurestep, Bernadette headed the General/Consumer practice placing middle to senior executives before taking advantage of the 2002 downturn in the economy to do some post graduate study in Australia. An innocent visit to see a Zydeco band during Easter break lead to her meeting a banana-farming, volunteer fireman, which lead to her moving in with him on a remote banana farm in the Kimberly region of Australia instead of returning to Hong Kong!

There Bernadette lived in a shack with her then husband, two border collies, a one-eyed lab X, a three-legged Kelpie, and a crazy Galah. She took this opportunity to work on a research project with the Gija People of the Warmun Aboriginal Community and also learned how to fish, grow vegetables, and build outdoor showers.

The following year was spent in Darwin as Area Manager covering the NT and Kimberly regions, driving around in a 4X4 through flooding rivers and wild landscapes, while selling industrial clothing to mine sites... just a small change from her bar-hopping, card-swapping lifestyle in ultra-cosmo Hong Kong!

Finally, the lack of decent shoestores and majestic hills to hike, along with the call of the urban jungle becoming too strong, Bernadette returned to Hong Kong in 2004 and set up BlaneyMundy, a boutique recruitment consultancy firm specialising functionally in Sales, Marketing and General Management positions as well as sourcing top recruitment talent for executive search firms in the region. Furthermore she provides career development services to the AGSM (Australian Graduate School of Management) in Hong Kong and Sydney working with current MBA students.

Bernadette now has the best of both worlds, living happily with her three dogs, one cat and a very fat goldfish in a place that overlooks the beautiful Clear Water Bay while networking with great people at all the ORIENTED events in Hong Kong.