Careers rarely end up going exactly to plan. Quite often people find themselves doing jobs that demand a set of skills different from their original qualifications or work experience.

This frequently happens when a job develops a training or educational dimension; up to now it was practically impossible to find a course with where people could top up life or work experience with a formal qualification in education and training.

To fill this gap, the school of education studies at Dublin City University has devised two new courses for staff working in new or changing educational and training situations. The certificate course in further education and training is a part-time, one-year in-service programme designed to equip students with the skills to design, deliver and manage education and training programmes. It is aimed at people working in a wide variety of education-related positions. from trainers in the private and public sectors to health educators, overseas development workers, leaders of community education and employment initiatives and those working with Travellers, youth and special-needs groups.

The course is centred around nine core modules; these cover topics such as curriculum development and evaluation, teaching and learning methodologies, micro-teaching, IT and concepts and contexts in education and training.

Students also carry out a practical project connected with their workplace.

The course begins with an orientation phase. Those out of the swing of formal education can brush up on basic study skills such as note taking, using the library and managing their study time effectively.

Depending on where people are working, funding may be available for the course - so it would be worth checking out this possibility with DCU. For those who have to pay their own fees, however, the certificate course costs £1,800.

A group of 27 people have just completed the first certificate course, and 17 of them are going on to do the diploma. The next intake for the certificate course will be next September, and there will be an information evening about this in the spring.

Anyone interested in following it up should contact Madeline McDermot and ask to be put on the mailing list for next year (tel: (01) 704 5223).

Those taking the diploma course start this autumn. According to the course co-ordinator, Terry Barrett, "the diploma is designed to be a follow-on from the certificate. The idea is to give people the opportunity to go into more depth on things and to enhance the skills and expertise they have gained," she says.

"The diploma is targeted at people from two main sectors: further education - including youth, community and adult education - and those involved in developing new programmes for post-primary students.

"The courses are based on adult-learning principles and are very student and group centred. There is a lot of interaction between the tutors and participants and we have a good system of consultation and review about the course. This ensures people get as much as possible out of the year they spend here," she says.

Marie Harford is exactly the sort of person the DCU course is aimed at. A tutor in life-saving, first aid and catering at the Basin Lane Youthreach project in inner-city Dublin, she is well qualified in her own subject areas but has no formal training in teaching or training methodologies.

"I applied for the course because I felt I wanted to be able to give more to the trainees," she says. "For example, the first-aid class requires quite an amount of literacy, because there are worksheets involved, but because some of our trainees have quite a low literacy level this can be a problem. I thought it would be useful to learn how to go about preparing programmes to take account of factors like this.

"The course was both a rewarding and a terrifying experience for me. My experience of exams had finished with the Primary Cert and it was quite a shock to find myself in the middle of a course at third level. I certainly struggled at the beginning and there were times during the year when I found it very hard going. "But I had fantastic support from my husband and my family, from my colleagues at work, who were terrific, and from the trainees who took a real interest in what I was doing.

"The people in the class were from all sorts of backgrounds. Some had a lot of formal qualifications, while others - like me - had none. At the beginning I never thought we would gel as a group, because we were so different and so mixed in ability, but in fact it worked really well and people's abilities and capabilities seemed to even out during the course of the year.

"I have decided to go on and do the diploma and while I think it will be tough and a very big challenge, I think it will a big help to me in my work and I'm looking forward to it."