Louise McFadden is a great believer in the Transition Year experience. It was during her Transition Year in St Mary's Holy Faith in Killester, Dublin, that McFadden got the chance to study German - "just because I liked it" - and discovered that there was more to business studies than she'd thought. "We got so much time to think and saw so much in Transition Year," she says, "that I was able to make the right choices for the Leaving Cert when I went into fifth year."
The right choices for Louise led to a job in teleservices with Hertz Rent-a-Car, a job she loves for itself and because of the "great international team on the staff; there are people from everywhere doing the work and it's all very friendly".
Growing up in the city's northside suburb of Coolock, she wasn't really sure what she would do when she finished school. The fourth child in a family of six - four girls and two boys - she loved St Mary's in Killester. "I liked being in an all-girls school. We talked openly about everything and got on well with the teachers. I studied French, which was compulsory, and I chose German as my second language. I loved Irish, the teacher was lovely. In Transition Year we looked at the cultures behind French and German, which was really good and meant we learned a lot about people."
She got what she wanted in the Leaving Cert but still "didn't really know what I wanted to do. I thought I might think about it for a while but on the day of the results my mother spotted ads in the paper for teleservice courses and I applied for two of them." She sailed through an interview and was accepted by her first choice, Whitehall House Senior College on the Swords Road in Dublin. Ideal in every way, "it was the one closest to home, they were very nice and friendly and part of the course involved a period of subsidised work experience in Germany".
The course was "brilliant", Louise says. "We did a lot of different subjects, like communications and business German, which taught us how to use the language formally. We covered customer care, IT, word processing, system support." In March of the first year she went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, high in the mountains of southern Germany. She worked there in the bar of a five-star hotel, an experience which she says was "deadly".
"There was a £2,000 supplement from the course, £500 of which went toward the flight and then £400 per month to live on. You need the money because Germany is very expensive and you've got to pay for everything. We were lucky enough to be fed and accommodated in the hotel."
She started back at college in September and, despite finding she'd "developed a taste for travel", took on new subjects and finished the course. She applied to Hertz Rent-a-Car who interviewed her for their German market division. "But I hadn't kept up my spoken German so they gave me a job in the British section here in Swords, Co Dublin." She's spent two happy months with Hertz Rent-a-Car now.
"I spent one month training, getting used to their system, which is not like Windows '95 but is fine, and inputting calls. Now that I'm working I find I really like dealing with people over the phone. You're in control and have to be assertive. It's not as difficult as I'd expected and the people I work with are great. There's a terrific social life attached to this job, including a sports and social club. I've made friends with a girl from Scotland and another from Canada and there are others from Belfast, Wales and New Zealand. They come from everywhere to work here."
She likes the shift hours too, one week working from 10.45 a. m. to 7 p. m. , the next from 10 a. m. to 6.15 p. m. She'll also be given an opportunity to brush up on her German, with in-house classes from Hertz.
Hertz Rent-a-Car employs some 850 people, 550 of them working in teleservices. Louise McFadden says there tends to be more women than men doing the job, with the breakdown about 60 per cent to 40 per cent.
