Troubleshooting is what makes Colette Rea happy. From Douglas in Cork City, she works as a diagnostic repair technician at Apple Computers. "There's plenty of scope in the job," she says.

Rea diagnoses the faults that are detected on printed circuit boards. "I'd work at the end of the line. All the boards are built and then tested; if the boards fail a test for some reason, they are sent over to us and we do the diagnosis to see if it needs a component changed. We have various oscillascopes, frequency metres and log analysers to help us do the job.

"It's interesting. You get great satisfaction especially if you get a difficult fault. Some of the faults are very easy but what makes it challenging is that sometimes you might spend an hour fixing it and you get great satisfaction out of that."

Five years after leaving school Rea started work in 1989 at Apple Computers, which is the biggest employer in the electronic sector in the area with a total of 1,500 employees working at its base in Cork. She enjoys her job in Hollyhill on the north side of Cork city and she says there are as many women as men working in her area, which is in the PCB (Printed Circuit Boards) section. Not having any idea about what she'd like to do after school, she worked at a number of jobs before she applied to Apple. Looking back, she says that she always liked maths at school. This interest has ulitimately paid off. Today her work involves calculations, deductions and problem solving. In her first year at Apple she worked as an operator on the factory floor, assembling and putting in parts on the printed circuit boards. At the end of 1990, after almost a year, she availed of an opportunity that employees were given: those who were interested were invited by the company to study for a qualification in electronics on a part-time basis. Those who did the three-year course over a four-year period continued to work, attending lectures after work, which were given by lecturers from Cork RTC during the week on two two-hour sessions on evenings in mid-week or at a four-hour session on Saturday mornings.

"We paid to do the exams and then, when we passed, we were reimbursed by the company each year as we passed our exams. It was an incentive to pass," she says. "The first year seemed very hard at the time. We were doing honours maths at Leaving Cert standard. But looking back it wasn't that bad. The last year it was tough enough. It was more detailed and intense. While we were doing the course we were getting work experience as well, working as company technicians. Then we were promoted to full-time permanent diagnostic repair technicians."

"There's plenty of scope. If you want to get on, you can. It's up to what you make of it yourself. I worked as a supervisor for about a year. I may do that again. If they are looking for someone for that job, they really go for someone with a technical background."

"There are plenty of girls in this job. A lot go on to do other jobs. There are absolutely loads of opportunities . . . I left Apple in 1994 and went to work in another company. It was more concerned with manufacturing main frames. I was mostly involved in systems testing but I felt I could get on better here. I came back at the end of 1995."