Teacher turned `techie'

Canadian-born Julia MacLauchlan is director of Microsoft's European Product Development Centre based at Sandyford in Dublin. The Centre employs 1,500 people and is one of three Microsoft operations located in Sandyford. In addition to having responsibility for the development centre, MacLauchlan is also a manager within the company's international language services division where she looks after language groups in Pacific Rim countries such as China, Japan and Korea.

MacLauchlan studied English and Spanish at university and subsequently qualified as a teacher. She first taught in Ottawa, Canada, before moving with her computer scientist husband to Texas where he had landed a senior position in the telecommunications sector. MacLauchlan taught in Texas for six years and loved it. Less impressive, she says, was the pay.

"My husband was paying more in taxes than my salary amounted to in a full year. But no one gets into teaching for the money and there were other challenges and rewards which made up for it. I taught mainly English literature but also some special education classes and I found a lot of spiritual and emotional pleasure in what I was doing. But when I actually began to enjoy teaching "Paradise Lost" - which I had always hated - I figured the time had come to get out and do something different," MacLauchlan says.

Around this time MacLauchlan's husband was posted back to Canada and then back to Texas within six months. "It was all a bit hectic and I hadn't had time to look for another teaching job when I happened to see an advertisement in the paper looking for an education specialist to work on developing computer products for schools," she says.

Despite having little or no experience of computers at the time, she got the job and found herself working under contract to IBM preparing work books for schools. "It was all completely new to me and very exciting if somewhat daunting," she says. "Then completely out of the blue the guy who was supposed to be writing a particular work book upped and left and I was thrown in at the deep end."

MacLauchlan rose to the challenge and was soon being used by IBM as its liaison person with the US Department of Education. Her career with the company flourished and when she left to follow her husband to his new job in Seattle in 1987 she was a director of the company which by then had become the second-largest computer publishing house in the US.

MacLauchlan was not happy about going to Seattle. "I felt I was going to a cultural dustbin on the edge of the universe," she says. "Seattle in those days is nothing like it is now and I wasn't looking forward to it." However, she knuckled down to her new life and was interviewed by both Microsoft and US West for a job. As her husband was working with US West she opted for Microsoft and got a job there as a senior editor. Within weeks she had been promoted to editing manager and within a year she was appointed manager of the publishing group.

An offer of a two-year posting to Ireland as product unit manager for the work group division followed and MacLauchlan decided to take it. "I had followed my husband's career for 11 years and my turn had come," she says. The couple and their young son moved to Dublin in 1993 and her husband, who by then had his own consultancy business, kept things ticking over from here. At the end of two years MacLauchlan's husband and son moved back to Seattle while she stayed in Dublin and commuted.

"It was a pretty stressful time for us as we were both travelling a lot and as we tried to never leave our son without one of us at home it involved a huge amount of juggling, which was pretty exhausting," she says. "We were both flying so much that we were on first name terms with the flight crews!"

The stress of this high-flying existence took its toll on the couple's health. They both had a brush with serious illness and decided to make a fundamental change to their lifestyle. MacLauchlan's husband and son moved back to Ireland and their son is now settled in school here while her husband works as a strategic adviser to an up-and-coming Irish communications company.

MacLauchlan is insistent that her career change is not exceptional. "There are so many opportunities for people from all sorts of backgrounds within the IT business and I just happened to go in one particular direction," she says. "There is room for people with all sorts of talent and we have quite a few ex-teachers on staff here. Teachers may think they don't have the kinds of skills we need. But if you think about it, managing a class requires a whole range of people and organisational skills. Of course we take on a lot of young people fresh from college, as their training is appropriate. But it's by no means a business for young people only. We look for talent first.

"Older people are intimidated by technology in a way that youngsters are not. But it's all down to familiarity. In my experience if you take a bit of time to show an older person how things work, they catch on very fast. My Dad is 82 and he wanted to go online so as we could communicate by e-mail. He's all set up now and is perfectly competent. I think technology holds tremendous opportunities for older people, especially for those who might be in isolated circumstances.

"In Microsoft terms I am not a techie and when I started off I was learning from scratch too. But if you're interested and fired up by what you're doing then you will seek out what you need to know. I work in a very exciting, creative and dynamic environment which I really enjoy. If you're an intrinsically motivated person then Microsoft is a good place to be as it's a very flat organisation which empowers its employees. If you're smart enough you're encouraged to go for it regardless of your age and this makes Microsoft a highly energised place to work."