The college which piloted the international teleservices programme in 1996, had its first graduates this summer. All seven students have found work. Rita Clifford, assistant principal at Ballyfermot Senior College, Dublin, says that the difficulty is persuading students to stay in college and complete the course is that they get job offers during the two years. "We feel it's important for them to complete the qualification," she says.

This year Ballyfermot Senior College has about 70 first-years beginning international teleservices courses in French, German, Italian and Spanish. The programme includes a large language input, says Clifford. "We have a mixture of teachers - both English-speaking and native continental language speakers," she adds.

Preparations for the 17-week work placement begins early and natives of the country can introduce students to the culture of work in that country - from responsibility and accountability to the important morning break or the lack thereof.

Clifford says the first year also includes IT, communications and customer care. Two cohorts of students from Ballyfermot have now gone abroad on work placement. No matter how much preparation you do, you can't cover everything, she says wryly; they are very young.

"We encourage students to fax us a letter every week. The first couple of weeks the faxes are miserable. But, after the teachers go out to visit them, things begin to look up. By the end of the summer, they don't want to come back."

Rory O'Sullivan, vice-principal of Ballsbridge College of Business Studies in Dublin, notes that it's the first time their PLC college (and most PLC colleges) have become involved in an overseas work placement. For them, it meant keeping the lines of communication with students open over the summer, a time when the college is closed.

In second year, students in Ballyfermot Senior College continue their IT, language and communication studies. They also study management and teleservices.

The courses around the country follow the same basic outline including the work placement. All of the colleges offering international teleservices have been provided with updated languages and IT labs. O'Sullivan says the new multimedia language lab in Ballsbridge College of Business Studies, which was supplied by the Department of Education, is linked by satellite to French and German TV and radio stations. The focus of the course is on the language element, he adds. "It's a languages course aimed at the teleservices business. One of the questions we ask potential students is whether they love languages. We make sure that people are very much aware of the languages component. They are timetabled for eight hours languages a week and the aim to ensure they are fluent by the time the two years have passed."

In addition to the international teleservices courses there are one-year teleservices courses at Post Leaving Certificate level which do not include the language element. Initially when the call centres were set up, mainly third-level graduates were recruited as they were the people with the language skills. However, many of these found the job, which involves a lot of computer and telephone work, unexciting. This is one of the main reasons the PLC sector has been targeted. Gerry Sharkey of the IDA insists that there is a career path for people who go into the sector. He points to the excellent starting salaries. PLC graduates can expect to make more than £11,000 a year in their first year of work. Sharkey insists there is a career path for people within the teleservices sector.