When Deborah Threadgold joined IBM 25 years ago, she didn’t have a grand plan to eventually take over the top job in Ireland. The Dublin-born general manager of IBM Ireland doesn’t come from a tech-heavy background, but the skills she has picked up along what she described as “the windy road to IBM” made her the natural pick for the job when it opened up.
“Fanciful notions, is how I describe it,” she says, recalling the one-to-one meeting that then manager William Burgess always had with new managers at the company. “I remember thinking it would be quite interesting to come back here and be general manager, and wouldn’t it be really cool if I was the first female general manager.”
And, 24 years later, Threadgold was back in Dublin, taking up the job that she once described as “fanciful notions”.
It wasn’t always the goal. Threadgold didn’t have a plan for her career mapped out from her teenage years that involved a business degree and rise to the top of corporate Ireland. Despite a natural aptitude for school, she didn’t immediately enter third-level education.
“I found myself coming out of sixth year and I had no plan. I was 16 years old, not sure what I was going to do,” she says. “I had no great ambitions, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I suppose back all those years ago, I didn’t understand the opportunities the world could bring.”
Career nudge
A stint in secretarial college landed her a job as a receptionist in a small insurance brokerage in Dublin, where she was encouraged to go further. “I was very lucky in this first job I did to have a friend who sort of tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Ok, stop messing around, you need to do something’.”
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