She is one of Australia's most respected and recognisable journalists with a career spanning four decades, but Lisa Wilkinson's media path all began with an ad in a newspaper's "women and girls employment section".
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"When I talk to students now and say I found my ad in the women and girls section, they actually laugh uproariously, they think I'm joking, which I think is a wonderful sign," she said.
Aged 18, her application for the role of "secretary/editorial assistant/Girl Friday" (the latter she says she still does not understand) at teen magazine Dolly was successful. It remained the only job she had ever applied for, she told a crowd of teachers at the Australian Education Union ACT's awards night at the National Press Club on Friday.
She was offered the Dolly editor position at 21, a position which allowed her to give a young Nicole Kidman her first photo shoot and magazine cover. In four years she tripled the readership before Kerry Packer offered her the top job at Cleo, which she successfully revamped and led for a decade.
Wilkinson, who never went to university and said she had no formal media education, paid tribute to her English teachers at Campbelltown High School in south-west Sydney who encouraged her interest in journalism and the English language.
She is now on the advisory board which selects the Walkley Award winners.
The Today co-host, 56, who has managed 3am wake-ups for nine years, said she had at times struggled with the juggling act of full-time work and parenting three kids, and women should not place unrealistic expectations on themselves to "have it all".
"For any woman who, like me, thinks that term 'have it all' is a noose around their neck, that came from US Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown," she said.
"This is a woman who had no kids, every day had a chef, a manicurist, a fashion and hair stylist, a cleaner, a masseuse, a husband who worked for her and possibly a partridge in a bloody pear tree to get her through the day."
"Don't feel inadequate any more."
St Vincent de Paul Society chief executive John Falzon, a strong advocate for the Gonski education reforms, was awarded the union's Friend of Public Education award. The Public Education Award went to Heather and Andy Wardrop, who started teaching on the same day in 1976 and now work at Lake Tuggeranong College and Erindale College respectively. The Reconciliation award went to Vicki Lucas, now acting principal at Giralang Primary School.
The wildly irreverent master of ceremonies, comedian Wendy Harmer, closed the event by announcing she would be doing a nude calendar to raise money for the union.
