NEW LIFE:Tracy Doyle had no inkling of things to come when she left the world of property to become a medical secretary, writes LORNA SIGGINS
MOVING out of a career in the property sector may make sense now but any talk of bubbles and crashes would have been regarded as somewhat ridiculous when Tracy Doyle decided she had had enough.
It was two years ago – that distant time when “phones never stopped ringing”. Doyle had enjoyed the challenge of it all, but started to get “fed up with the late nights and weekend work and never being able to knock off”.
Every day, she and her colleagues would receive emails about sales targets and projected figures. “I began to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this,” she says.
And yet she had loved it for so long. Originally from Finglas, Dublin, Doyle completed a secretarial course after school and her first job was as a telesales administrator with Lafferty Publications in Pearse Street. She was with the company for three years when she saw an advertisement for a post a bit closer to home in Phibsborough, with Mason Estates.
There was a “great crew and great atmosphere”, she says. “Then Mason Estates started to do mortgages and I got on well with the mortgage advisor. He wasn’t very good on a computer, so I used to do his administration on a Friday. This evolved into a full-time position.”
She hadn’t considered sales seriously until she was approached by ICS Building Society and invited to come in for a chat. She completed three interviews, and was offered a job with ICS in the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC).
Her brief initially was in the equity release department, working with existing customers. She progressed into mortgage administration, and then to mortgage consultant.
“There was such a great team there and I really loved my work. I thought: ‘This is for me.’ But then after a month in ICS my boss said that I was doing such a good job that they were transferring me to the flagship branch in Grafton Street,” she says.
“I was devastated, I didn’t want to leave IFSC and I didn’t feel I would be any good in my new role. I was told on the Friday and I had to start work on the Monday in Grafton Street. I cried for two weeks, as I hated it – but then I got talking to one of the lads and he really helped me along,” she says.
She worked there for three years, taking exams to enable her to practice full-time as mortgage consultant, and was then approached by another broker in Dublin.
“I was promised the sun, moon and stars and I handed in my notice with ICS,” she says.
It was to be one of the worst decisions she had ever made, she says. After four months with the new broker, she handed in her notice and moved to another company in the same area which was associated with estate agents.
“It was very like Mason Estates so I enjoyed it. There was a young crowd and we got on very well,” she says. “I got moved around quite a bit – first I was in Ballsbridge, then I moved to Lucan, and then I finally settled between the Drogheda and Navan branches.”
But the long, demanding hours were getting to her. “I always loved administration so I did a bit of research on the internet,” she says.
She noticed quite a few of the administrative vacancies were in the health area, as a medical secretary, and the money seemed good. However, experience was emphasised in every case.
She went back to the web, searching for a suitable course that would give her the experience she required. She found that Pitman offered a diploma in medical secretarial skills, and that there was a Pitman college in Swords, north Dublin, which was easy to travel to from her new home in Ratoath, Co Meath.
She applied and was accepted but then became pregnant. She was still studying when her daughter was born in November 2007. She returned to Pitman two months later in January 2008 and completed the diploma.
“I was due back to work in July 2008 so I did up my CV, and I saw a job on the internet for a position in Santry, Dublin,” she says. She applied and received a phone call about a week later for an interview.
With no time to brush up on interview skills, she was in a state of nerves. “There were three people on the interview panel and my mouth was so dry,” she says. It was also the shortest interview she had ever completed.
Two days later, to her pleasant surprise, the phone rang and she was offered the post. She handed in her notice, leaving the property and financial world behind her. She has been working as secretary to an orthopaedic surgeon in a sports injury clinic ever since.
“It’s never easy to make a decision to change, and it was really only instinct that told me I wasn’t comfortable with what I was doing,”she says.
“I suppose in hindsight I can see that one of the difficulties was that we weren’t meeting the sales targets – the housing market had begun to slow down a bit – but no one really noticed it back then.
“And to think that if I had stayed where I was, I would probably be redundant now. As it is, I am well equipped for the years ahead.”