Templemore College – What ever happened to the Secretarial Course?

Many of you reading this article will remember being sent to the local “tech” after your inter cert or leaving cert to do this course in order to get a job in a local office.  Those of you who were good at the exams may have succeeded  in getting placed on the panel for the health board, county council or civil service.

Do you still remember “fingers on the home keys”, return the carriage sharply, feet flat on the floor.  The drills associated with typing and no corrections except with the awful correction paper.  Flying capitals and half spaces – the stuff of nightmares.  At least an hour every day and then another hour or two on Gregg Shorthand.  Learning a new language.  Taking dictation at a minimum of 80 wpm but really striving for 120 to 140 wpm.  The notebook that was ruled down the middle so you didn’t have to waste time going back across a wider page.  However, that was the easy part – the major difficulty was writing back in perfect English what you had written in shorthand.  Basic bookkeeping and office procedures were the other subjects that were studied as part of this course.

Teacher Therese Purcell with some of her students in the Business Administration Department at Templemore College.

The secretarial course does still exist but under a different name.  In Templemore College it is called Business Administration Skills. Today, the students use the computer to type.  They still have to strive to reach a minimum of 35 wpm and find this very difficult because they have all the bad habits of using a keyboard since they were knee high. They also study payroll and bookkeeping both manually and on computer.  Office procedures are taught but as well as written work they have to demonstrate their skills.  In addition they go out on work experience and develop their communications skills. A voice recorder has replaced shorthand.

So the Secretarial course is alive and well – just changing its name and adapting to the new world.  Local businesses still hire our students and many have in the past been employed in the public sector until the employment embargo.  It is a fantastic course for the student who isn’t sure of what career direction to take.  You learn skills that will be used throughout your life.

If you like to learn more about this course or courses on offer at Templemore College please check out our website www.tcfe.ie or www.facebook.com/TemplemoreCollege