Putting the effort into night-time study helped his progress to the top

At the age of 31, Damien Mooney is the youthful marketing director of tour operators Falcon JWT. A year-round tan goes with the job as do regular visits to the hot spots familiar to Irish holidaymakers from the pages of their travel brochures.

To some, Mooney's job would be the epitome of the glamorous career. But he worked hard to get there, taking on a succession of demanding evening courses including a degree in marketing and more recently an MBA. In total Mooney spent seven years working by day and studying at night.

Born in Dublin, Mooney was educated at Inchicore VEC. He left school in 1985 and like many youngsters was not exactly clear about what he wanted to do. He took a job in a local furniture store as a stop-gap and decided to repeat a number of subjects in the Leaving Certificate. At the same time he learnt to type and word process.

"I decided that whatever I was going to do, keyboard skills would never be wasted," says Mooney, who as the lone male in a class of 28 women was taken under the wing of the nun in charge. "I got very good tuition and being able to type properly came in very handy later on when I had essays and a thesis to write."

Mooney quickly decided that his priority was to get a job rather than to go into full-time third-level education. "I suppose it was a rather sensible decision for an 18-year-old, but having repeated the Leaving at night on my own while working during the day I knew that that working and studying were not mutually exclusive. I may have missed out on some of the craic of being a full-time student but that has never really bothered me as I felt I was clocking up valuable practical experience which would stand to me later on," he says.

In 1986 Mooney got a temporary job in the civil service. He was based in the aliens section of the Department of Justice where he says he got a lot of experience of dealing with delicate and difficult situations. "I enjoyed the job a lot and it was a challenging and progressive environment to be in as a young person," he says. "But it was only for a year so I knew I had to find something else. I identified what to me were attractive industries and businesses in terms of their potential as career opportunities and I wrote off to a number of companies in these sectors. I think my background in dealing with the public in the civil service got me my first `real' job as a customer relations executive with what was then Joe Walsh Tours."

Having secured his first rung on the career ladder, Mooney, then aged 19, turned his attention to developing his academic credentials. He enrolled as a night student with the Marketing Institute and four years later graduated with a degree. In the meantime his career with JWT moved on and he began combining a marketing role and customer relations role within the company. In 1989 he was appointed marketing manager at JWT and in 1991 he moved to a similar position at Falcon Travel. He has been Falcon's marketing director since 1997.

In 1992 Mooney reviewed his skills and decided that a qualification in finance would be an ideal complement to his marketing degree. "Basically I decided to blow the myth that a non-accountant could not get to grips with accounting and finance," he says. "I also wanted to be able to understand how the finance side of a business worked and to be comfortable with the principles and language behind the finance and accounting disciplines."

Mooney took on a one-year course in accounting and finance which he describes as "very tough and intensive". However, he says it was worth the effort. "I wanted to move away from having marketing alone as my central hub and the means by which I interpreted everything what went on around me," he says. "I think it's important to have a broader picture and it certainly made me far more comfortable around the whole issue of managing finance within the company."

With MBAs fast becoming a basic qualification for managers with a career in senior management on their minds, Mooney decided to look at what courses were on offer. He checked out MBA options in the Republic, Britain and Northern Ireland and chose a course at the University of Ulster.

"I chose the North for two main reasons," he says. "First, the cost of the course was significantly less than down here and second I was working an average of one day a week in Belfast and I could fit my time at college in around that. I'd leave Dublin at 7 a.m., work in our Belfast office until lunchtime, go to College from early afternoon until about 9 p.m. and then drive back to Dublin. It was a tight schedule but a very effective way of using my time."

MOONEY'S "day" job demands quite a bit of overseas travel so his studying had to be fitted in around this. "The key to the whole thing was being organised, very focused and very productive," he says. "I'm not married so I didn't have to worry about family things and I'm fortunate in having a very understanding girlfriend. But I didn't drop out of society completely. I tried to take every second weekend off and fitted my studying into three or four nights a week. The most important thing was getting into a pattern and sticking to it. If I was studying I was studying and if I couldn't settle I'd do something else until I could."

Mooney's rigorous discipline paid off. He received his MBA with distinction and was one of the top students in his year. "I think there is a right time to do these things when your commitment to achieving your goal is at its strongest," he says.

"I don't regret having gone straight into the workforce from school. I think it allowed me to progress my career faster and I had the advantage of studying the principles and the theories at night and seeing how they worked in practice by day. Those coming straight from an academic environment don't have this opportunity."