Delighted with the course

There's no mistaking the enthusiasm in her voice. Leanne Power is delighted to have completed a PLC course in teleservices.

She was working until recently in a computer company in Waterford. "It was great," she says. "I really liked it. I was only on the shop floor but I learned so much more about computers," she says. In her job at Planet PC, "they sold computers and offered a really good after-sales service.

After completing her Leaving Cert at Our Lady of Mercy Secondary School two years ago, she says she wanted to enjoy life, "but then everybody was going to college."

From Dunmore East in Co Waterford, she applied for a PLC course in international teleservices at the city's Central Technical Institute. After completing the course, she started work at a rapidly expanding company in Waterford city.

One of the PLC's most appealing features was the promise of spending four months in Germany learning the language and the skills necessary for a career in teleservices.

"It was brilliant. We were just really lucky. We had free food, free accommodation and a grant on top of that. And we had to talk in German or starve, so we had to learn."

The PLC course involved studying areas such as customer care, computers, communication skills and German. "There was a bit of everything," she says. "It was a new course so we were like guinea pigs but we knew we'd get jobs at the end.

The students did surveys and reports and learned "how to deal with people over the phone. It is about knowing how people think and being able to help them", she explains.

The course was demanding and some of the people who signed up dropped out. "They got disheartened but I'm delighted I stuck it out."