Adam Bettaney
2026 Saltire Scholar
Business Continuity and Resilience Intern, Network Rail
International Business with French, University of Strathclyde
About me
Hey! I’m Adam Bettaney, and I recently graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a Masters degree in International Business with French. Coming to the end of my studies, I understood that I needed to begin building solid career foundations and aspirations, and the Saltire Scholars Programme stood out as the perfect option towards this goal. I was persuaded by the variety of host companies and transformational learning resources. Besides gaining an internship, I wanted to advance this life transition and be able to take academic skills and learnings into a professional domain. The programme certainly fulfilled this.
My internship
My summer internship took place at Network Rail, and my role was based in the business continuity and resilience department. This involved collaborating with operations managers to recover continuous railway services after disruptive incidents. This was facilitated by resolving planning document gaps and establishing incident recovery recommendations based on spreadsheet analysis and feedback gathered at continuity workshop meetings. Despite my degree background in marketing, this internship largely steered away from this, offering more data analysis tasks. I strongly appreciated this as it helped enhance my versatility and understanding of different business areas.
Impactful Experience
This experience positively impacted Network Rail as my workshop hosting introduced digital exercise learning documentation to support future incident responses, and my planning restructuring enables staff to understand which actions to take during incident response without risking misinterpretation. However, the most impactful and rewarding element for myself occurred whilst completing maintenance volunteering at Bo’ness & Kinneil Railway. Despite being out of my comfort zone, I successfully excavated ballast pits and installed new rail sleepers, fostering greater self-confidence. I built valuable connections with people who had great insights and who ensured complete support when I had trouble understanding railway concepts.
Life changing experience
This internship helped me learn a lot about myself, such as my strengths and weaknesses, providing a means of working on them both. It has ensured personal growth e.g. stakeholder meetings improving social skills, and professional growth e.g. supporting organisational outcomes improving self-confidence. It has opened my eyes up to potential future career paths. Beforehand, I only considered marketing roles, but now, I am also interested in data analysis work. Previously, I couldn’t wrap my head around data software e.g. Excel, but now, I am well versed and received positive feedback on my operations spreadsheets. I’m rather proud of that.
Pay it forward
I cannot recommend the Saltire Scholars programme enough. It represents a period of growth and accomplishment that you don’t gain elsewhere, and from this, you carry a badge of excellence that assures recruiters of your unique skills and experience which carries more potential than non-Saltire applicants.
If you are reading this and thinking about applying, just do it! no matter how far you proceed on the programme, you will gain something valuable which will benefit your future career. Be sure to make the most of your internship, ask many questions, and use your initiative to solve hidden problems. Demonstrate your entrepreneurial mindset and you’ll prosper.
