For weary visitors to stand number 13 at the Aontas lifelong learning exhibition there was a treat in store. Massage therapist Robert Dowdal was busy soothing away the strains of standhopping with a neck and shoulder massage for anyone willing to join the queue.

"We certainly caught people's attention by doing massages on the stand," says Jane Kennedy of the Celtic Health Centre, which provides evening classes and workshops in a range of complementary therapies, from Indian head massage to stress management.

"We find that people are becoming very interested both in having treatments and in learning more about them. We offer a full range of individual treatments such as acupuncture and massage as well as short and full-time courses for people who want to study a subject and perhaps take it further and get a qualification."

More than 3,000 people visited the Aontas exhibition this year. Pamela Molloy travelled from Kildare: "I've come each year for the last three years because it's geared for adults and it's not too frantically busy so those on the stands have time to talk to you," she says. "I have found it very useful because you get most of the main colleges in one place so you can pick up their literature, ask your questions and compare the courses on offer. "I found it very useful for myself in deciding what course degree was best for me, but I also found it a good way of getting an idea about the sort of courses that might suit my family - either now for the ones who are working or in the future for the two who are still at school," she says.

"We cut the exhibition back from three to two days this year because we found it was too drawn out. However, this didn't affect the numbers. We still got roughly the same volume of people as in previous years," says Aontas chief executive, Berni Brady.

"Getting a third-level qualification is still the key aim of most of the people who come to the exhibition. This is backed up by our experience on our phone lines between January and July this year when more than 60 per cent of the calls to the Aontas office were about getting into third-level courses. "We get very few calls now about basic education. These needs now appear to be served by local education initiatives and national literacy schemes.

"The exhibition is very much aimed at individual adult learners and we always get more women than men. Perhaps some people would find the exhibition a bit quiet - there aren't loads of things going on for people to see - but the big advantage is that it's quiet enough for people to talk to those manning the stands and to come away from the exhibition with quite a lot of indepth information instead of skimming the surface," Brady says.

With tourism continuing to grow in importance as an industry, CERT was on hand with information about tourism-related courses for adults. Essentially there are four main programmes, covering topics such as home hospitality, tourism enterprise development, customer care and marketing.

The home-hospitality course is aimed at those who would like to start a B&B, while the enterprise-development course is designed for those with a tourism-related business idea. There is an option on both courses to follow a European-language module.

For those based in Dublin, CERT runs open interviews every Monday from 9.30 a.m. to 12 noon. Details about the courses mentioned and where they are available around the State are available from the adult education co-ordinator, CERT House, Amiens Street, Dublin 1 (tel: (01) 855 6555; email: adult.ed@cert.ie)

Childcare is also a growing sector, and those unable to get to organised courses may be interested in the home-study programmes offered by the Dublin-based School of Practical Child Care.

The school offers a foundation certificate course in childcare by distance learning as well as courses in running a day nursery, in caring for older people and in caring for a child or an adult with a disability. It also runs full-time day and evening courses at its campus in Blackrock (tel: (01) 288 6994).