Link to TBL NAME not working post design

[Jon_Eynon]

I have inherited a project and have been working on the API side of things but am now getting into the table structure and have a question.
Structure:
’Employees’ Table. All employees in the company.
Includes Email, Specialties (Link to Specialties), and Coverages (Link to Coverages).
’Specialties’ Table. All specialties provided by the company.
Includes ‘Name’, and ’ Link to Employees’
’Coverages’ Table. All coverages provided by the company.
Includes ‘Name’, and ‘Link to Employees’

The idea is that I can access the Employees table via the API and get all the specialties and coverages an employee offers. In the linked Specialties column of Employees I can add Specialties just fine and the data finds it way back and forth. Delete an Employee from ‘Link to Employees’ from Specialties and it is great.
The group added this Coverages table and has added all the Employees to the ‘Link to Employees’. They sit there just great. I am now trying to get them to back populate to the Employees table. *

The ‘Link to Coverages’ in the Employee table does not pull back, or push, data to the Coverages table

*.
Why does Specialties working and not Coverages? Is it that Coverages was made after the fact and the employee lookup doesn’t know what to look for. Structurally they look EXACTLY the same.
For the sake of my project being able to make an API call to Employees versus all three would be ideal.
I have to be missing something simple here. Thanks for the support.

[Jon_Eynon]

Recognizing a string as an entry in a linked table Importing / Exporting

So I’m building a base that, among other things, records contractor time. Our data is imported regularly as a CSV and each record corresponds to an accomplished task. Each task-record has the contractor’s name as a string, as well as the start and end times of that task. I was hoping to be able to keep track of my contractors in a separate table where we will also record each contractor’s hourly rate. I know I can use a lookup to access the hourly rate from the linked record - but is there a wa…

So is it that they did this step prior to me coming onto the project? So if I import, in text values, the employees email addresses into the Link to *** column and convert it will be smart enough to push and pull after that? Would I need some kind of vlookup to get the values in the column?
Digging but need help!

[Jon_Eynon · Accepted solution]

The issue was resolved by converting the existing links back to text and then linking them again to the table. The issue was that AirTables was hiding the newly created referenced links at the end of the table.