The national profile of young Westport entrepreneur Liam Printer continues to grow as hundreds of thousands of listeners tuned in to his interview live in studio on Today FM’s Ray D’Arcy Show on Tuesday. Liam is the current Irish National Snowboard Champion having won two gold medals at The Irish Ski and Snowboard Championships in France. He is also a director and head of ;anguages at the highly successful FETAC accredited national training and education provider, The Learning Curve Institute, which he set up with his business partner in 2009. He has now started a spin off product of The LCI with his “Learning Curve Camps” where students from all over the world gather together in the Alps to learn languages in a full immersion environment, ski or snowboard with The Irish National Snowboard Champion, and come home with an internationally recognised FETAC accredited certificate in the language they are studying.
The Ray D’Arcy Show was doing a segment on people who have turned their hobbies into jobs and Liam was invited on to the show along with Maureen, who has set up her own knitting company in Dublin, and Liam Kidney, a photographer from Cork. Liam explained that he took a year out after his Leaving Cert and spent six months working in a hotel in the French Alps where he learnt fluent French and also got to snowboard every day. He then returned to Ireland in 2003 and graduated top of his class from DCU in 2007 with a first class honours degree in international business with French and Spanish. Liam then went to New Zealand and trained to become an instructor and since then he has shared his passion for snowboarding and languages as an instructor in Whistler, Canada; New Zealand; and Zermatt, Switzerland.
Throughout the interview Liam encouraged other would be entrepreneurs to prendre le taureau par les cornes (grab the bull by the horns ). “If you have an idea and you have a passion for something then just go for it!” he said. “If you can minimise the risk and maximise the potential then do that. For example if you can start a business from a home office as opposed to taking out a huge loan then try that first and see how it goes.”
When Liam is not running the ski and snowboard language camps he regularly delivers Leaving Cert French and Spanish revision courses in Westport and FETAC accredited part time courses in French and Spanish in Castlebar, Galway, and Sligo with The Learning Curve Institute. The Leaving Cert preparation and revision courses have been a huge success over the past two years and have been fully booked well in advance as Liam’s reputation as a gifted and passionate language teacher in the country grew.
Liam is now looking to bring his Learning Curve Camps to the west of Ireland in the form of surf and adventure language learning camps for students of English, French and Spanish from next summer. “We’re in a very special position that we can offer FETAC accredited certificates in languages, so a 16-year-old, or whatever, goes off for two weeks, they learn how to surf or snowboard with a national champion, and then they come home with an internationally recognised FETAC accredited component certificate in French, Spanish or English,” explained Liam on the Ray D’Arcy Show.
To find out more about the language courses Liam runs in the west see www.thelearningcurve.ie and to learn more about the exciting ski and snowboard language camps visit www.learningcurvecamps.com You can also find them on Facebook and Twitter or contact Liam at The Learning Curve Institute office on 098 25530.
