Millstreet native Caroline Dowling is featured in the Sunday Times Business section today. She is president of the Integrated Network Solutions business group at Flextronics (an international $24 billion company). We don’t have the full article to show at present, just the start of it (below) [Seán has added some photos from the article]
Earlier this year she was also named one of the “Top 50 Most Influential Women in Technology”. To read that article, just click this link.
Below is a video of Caroline answering questions, and is from a few years back:
======================================
From school dropout to Silicon Valley superstar
Caroline Dowling, president of Flextronics’s network unit, is a big deal in the tech industry – but she’ll never forget her humble beginnings Published: 1 December 2013
With her smart-casual blazer, mid-Atlantic accent and iPad close to hand, Caroline Dowling seems every inch the standard corporate high flier. Yet her journey from the small town of Millstreet in north Cork to being one of the most senior executives at Flextronics, a $25bn (€18bn) electronics manufacturer, was hardly textbook.
One of five children of a truck driver and housewife, Dowling, 46, left formal education at Millstreet Community School at the age of 15, when she became pregnant.
“I have a 30-year-old daughter,” she said. “I left school at 15, and got work doing housekeeping and bar work. It wasn’t easy, in a small town.”
When her daughter, Sarah, went to school, Dowling went back to education too. The secretarial course she did in nearby Kanturk seems an unlikely grounding for one of the biggest jobs at a company with 220,000 employees and 126 manufacturing plants spread across more … (from the Sunday Times)
In the Corporate World her’s is now a great name
She has known great success and success comes with wealth and fame
The President of Flextronics International great success she has known
In Millstreet they are proud to claim the beautiful Caroline Dowling for their own
By her climb to success one can only feel amazed
In Murphy’s Terrace in Millstreet she was born and raised
On the hill of success she has climbed the hard way
Her father Daithi he must feel a proud man today
One can say of her in a class of her own
In the Corporate World Caroline is well known
Of Caroline Dowling one can only say
That she fully deserves to be where she is at today
She rose through the ranks and came up the hard way
Perseverance and hard work for Caroline did pay.
Caroline Dowling is by Francis Duggan