Careers
Tell us how Education & Professional Development has supported your Career
I graduated from Trinity College with a business degree and I built my career from there. I took a year career break from a FETAC co-ordinator role in a school in 2005 and analysed my skills gaps, which focused mainly around a shortfall in my IT skills, but then again, lots of people my age would experience similar gaps. I did five courses that year to bring my IT skills up to scratch which mainly revolved around Microsoft qualifications and JEB IT training. I also completed a Train the Trainer course with the IITD. These courses enabled me to set up my own training business.
When I saw the opportunity to bring tech to what I did in the business, I engaged in entrepreneurial courses with New Frontiers (through Enterprise Ireland), and a 12-week Female Flyers Programme at the DCU Ryan Academy.
How has your Career Path developed over the years?
Ann-Marie McSorley is the CEO and founder of Fioru Software Solutions, employing 10 staff in Kilkenny and Belfast. Fioru delivers IT solutions, training and consultancy and, together with their client, Impact Training, created the Veri App. The app helped reduce administration costs of training compliance paperwork by 40% and turned large amounts of raw QA data into information and analytics.
After graduating from college, I went into the tourism sector for four years. I was always managing teams, and even as a 22-year-old I was managing a team of 30 young people. I was also responsible for informal training at that time.
I moved into the public sector for a couple of years with the Local Government, NSPCC in Northern Ireland before taking on a commercial director role with the Odyssey Arena.
After my career break, I won two contracts leading programmes for the Oireachtas and the Ombudsman for Children on democracy and politics for primary and secondary schools.
Soon after I established my own business, developing bespoke training programmes, contracting for many Skillnet Ireland networks, before becoming a subject matter expert on IT training programmes for FAS (now SOLAS) and subsequently developed and managed a programme for Kilkenny Leadership Partnership transferring skills and developing employability through local SMEs.
What was the stimulus/incentive to start your own company?
The contract with Kilkenny Leader Partnership was a big one. As a labour market activation initiative developing employability and education programmes, there was an enormous amount of paperwork to get through. Frustrated by the duplication and administration issues I encountered during this time, I decided to find a solution to improve and streamline quality assurance and that was the birth of the Veri App.
What challenges/difficulties did you face?
The biggest was that I was a single parent with three teens and juggling everything life throws at you.
Ann-Marie McSorley CEO and founder of Fioru Software Solutions
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A second challenge was explaining the problem of quality compliance paperwork to funders. Thankfully my clients
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