Growing up in north County Mayo, Cathal Kearney had always wanted to be a teacher. Even when he became a financial accountant with Digital in Galway, he still wanted to be a teacher.

Seven years into his career with the multinational, Kearney finally made the break and got a job at Dundalk IT.

His career with Digital came about more by accident than design. At the time, he was doing commerce at NUI, Galway. "To improve my interviewing skills during my final year, I decided to apply for a number of jobs," he recalls. "I sat two interviews and got two job offers. I decided to take the Digital job, it was in Galway - a young person's paradise - and the idea of working in industry for a few years before teaching appealed to me."

Four years into the job, Kearney was ready to embark on an HDip when, out of the blue, he was invited to join Digital's European Internal Audit Group. He had struck gold and was in a state of shock. "It was an elite group of Digital staff from all over Europe who travelled from location to location conducting audits," he says. "No other Irish person had worked in the European group up to then."

His first year was tough: "I was thrown in at the deep end. I remember interviewing very senior managers about how they were running their businesses, whether policies and procedures were being adhered to, and being very unsure whether the answers I received were correct. But I learned a lot and can safely say that my audit experience was excellent preparation for third-level education."

By 1986, Kearney had moved to Dundalk IT as a lecturer in management, business strategy and financial accounting. Was he was mad to give up his fantastic job? "I was very unsure that I had made the right decision," he concedes. "I was leaving behind a wealth of opportunities, one of which was the chance to work at a management level in almost any location in Europe. But I had the teaching bug and I followed my instinct and to this day I have no regrets."

His multinational experiences have proved a real strength. "I couldn't imagine teaching management without my background in business," he says. "It would be very difficult. Accounting - for example - is a very different subject. It's very structured. To be a good accountant you have to be methodical. Management is completely different."

Kearney was lecturing at Dundalk for 10 years before he was appointed head of the department of financial, management and professional studies. These days, much of his time is taken up with course development.

In the years he's been in Dundalk, the number of students taking business studies has almost doubled - to 1,000. In the early days, the college offered only diploma and certificate courses. High-achieving diploma students were transferring to the fourth year of university programmes in order to gain degrees. "We were exporting our best talent," Kearney says. "The question was, How could we keep them on board?" Beefing up the qualifications on offer proved the key. Kearney was involved in the development of the advanced certificate in accounting - the equivalent of the first two years of a four-year degree programme - and a one-year add-on degree in business studies. While the accountancy course was initially extremely popular, numbers began to drop after four years. The reason? It wasn't a full degree programme.

To meet the demand, the college developed a three-year ab initio degree programme in accounting and finance. "The course has been running for five years and it's really successful," Kearney says. "It attracts student from all over Ireland - strong students who are performing well and getting jobs in the major accountancy firms." Dundalk IT has been offering an MBA in conjunction with UU since 1986. Last year, however, the college decided to go it alone and develop its own course. The first cohort of students on the part-time, one-day-per-week programme is set to graduate in 2003.

Come autumn, Dundalk's department of financial, management and professional studies is offering three new ab initio degree programmes - bachelors of business studies in marketing and e-business, marketing and French and marketing and German. Approval for these courses has only recently been achieved - and applications can be made through the CAO's change-of-mind form, Kearney says.

A distinguishing feature of the three courses is that all students will study abroad in their final years. Kearney describes studying abroad as "a huge confidence-booster. It's not just the language, it's a cultural experience," he says. "Knowing you can survive in a foreign college gives you great self-confidence. People come back from a year abroad and say it was the best year of their lives".

These days, Kearney says, there's a great buzz around the Dundalk campus, much of it due to the innovative approach taken by the college's new director, Dr Tom Collins, the former director of adult and community education at NUI, Maynooth. Given the changing demographics and the reduction in Leaving Cert numbers, Kearney remains adamant that the ITs, which boast lower student/teacher ratios than the universities, are well placed to compete with them for students. "Because we are smaller, our system suits certain types of students who may do well in our sector but would drown in the vastness of a large university. Compared with classes of 30 to 40, a class of 300 students makes for a totally different learning environment," he says.

Interestingly, Kearney has begun to questioning the nature of exams. His years in Dundalk have taught him that some students who do poorly in theoretical courses can shine in practical programmes. "We see it in our applied cultural studies course," he says. "You see people who don't do well in the theoretical courses, but put them into film or theatres studies and they're stars. There must be a better way of assessing what people can do than a three-hour exam. Ideally, I'd like to move away from final exams - the system is crying out for more creative ways of assessment. At the moment, we're simply benefiting people who can write and perform well in a three-hour exam. Is that what we want?"

Factfile

Education: St Patrick's College, Lacken Cross, Ballina, Co Mayo. BComm (NUI, Galway, 1980). MBA (UU 1992).

Family: married to Bernadette, a science teacher. Children: Ronan aged 11 years and Elaine aged nine.

Holidays: northern Majorca and Florida.

Hobbies: vegetable gardening, Gaelic football and swimming.

Current reading: The Empty Raincoat by Charles Handy