Career Heroes - Tony Madden

Tell us more about you

I’ve always been involved in sports and enjoy numerous different activities. I’ve done so for most of my life. I canoe, climb, waterboard, ski - a whole range of things.

I also really enjoy the outdoors. Along with my wife and children, we all enjoy a kind of outdoorsy lifestyle.

My father was a great athlete all his days and I’ve tried to incorporate that sporty approach into my own life and I really do love it.

What kind of work do you do?

As Regional Manager of the charity, Career Ready, I work to improve the employability skills of young people in Northern Ireland. The way that we do that is to identify students that maybe don’t have a great support network to help them build confidence, or young people that would like some extra help in gaining employability skills.

I work with secondary schools and Further Education Colleges. In each school or college, we try to identify 15 to 30 students to participate in our programmes. They complete application forms, and if successful, will benefit from our careers advice and our mentoring service, where we match an industry professional with an individual so they can be mentored and receive guidance on how they might succeed in a particular career area.

Students who engage in our programme are aged between 16 and 18. I regularly encourage local companies to get involved, and they will sometimes offer students paid internships as well as mentoring.

I often give talks in schools and work with pupils in the classroom to identify who might benefit from our programme. If I’m not out and about working with schools and colleges all across Northern Ireland, I work from home.

I definitely feel like this is my purpose in life; to help young people find their perfect career path and help them build confidence in their own capabilities.

How did you become a Regional Manager ?

I did a generalist degree in Business Studies and then worked my way up to being a Head of School at Northern Regional College. In my late thirties, I did a Master's degree in Computers.

I was Head of School at Northern Regional College for quite some time before a colleague brought the Career Ready programme into the college and I began to get involved. I ran the school of Business and Computing and then began to implement the Career Ready programme with students.

If you could do-over, What would you do differently?

My skills are all about helping people and I’ve been doing that all my life and I’m very passionate about it.

The only thing I would have done differently if I had to do it all again is that I would go back and do a more specific degree. I could have done computing earlier instead of waiting until a much later stage in my career.