Ria Kennedy (41) works for a property management company, a new job that she started a couple of months ago. She lives in Killiney, Co Dublin, and drives into work in the city centre each day.

It's a job that requires a high level of organisational skills. Ria Kennedy started off as a PA and soon found that as no-one else was looking after the maintenance aspects, she was called upon to do it.

"No-one else looks after building maintenance, so you just take it on yourself," she says. She used her skills in this area to build her career, making a conscious decision recently to move up the ladder.

She says that she was looking for specific job openings, rather than just doing a general sweep through recruitment agencies. The job she started recently came up through the Reed group and of them, Ria says: "They were very efficient, gave me lots of info and were always willing to help."

The new job enabled her to move from being an office manager to being a facilities manager and the company she's now with is Chesterton Workplace Management, a UK-based firm active in the Irish market.

It's a long established company, founded around a century ago, for many years an estate agents and which in recent times, has expanded into facilities management.

Ria Kennedy is responsible for running the building facilities management for ICL, a leading IT industry company. It has one site in Harcourt Street, Dublin, where she is based, another location in Leopardstown and one in Dundalk.

Her job is to ensure that everything connected with the buildings' infrastructures and services is always in perfect working order. The Chesterton contract covers ICL in the whole island and Ria Kennedy has a colleague who's her opposite number in ICL in Northern Ireland.

She needs her car to get into work in Harcourt Street each morning, because she doesn't know when she will have to visit the other sites.

In summer, she says that if she leaves the house at 7.30a.m., it takes her about half an hour to drive in, but the journey takes much longer in winter. During the winter, she leaves between 6.45a.m. and 7a.m. to get in on time. If she leaves any later, she will have missed the window of opportunity with the traffic.