PROPERTY prices in Hong Kong are among the highest in the world. Retailers in Causeway Bay pay more than €4,500 per square metre a year, making the area the third most expensive shopping district in the world after New York’s Fifth Avenue and Paris’s Champs Elysees.

High rents mean high commissions for agents and the chance to build a lucrative career and amass a nice nest egg. Ten years at the top of the property business was enough for Ann Marie O’Donoghue who decided in March 2002 that she wanted to do something different with her life. The Nenagh-born agent signed a one-year contract with Goal, the charity, to work as a volunteer programme administrator in Malawi, in central Africa.

“I was highly impressed with the Malawians,” says O’Donoghue. “This is a country in which 65% of the population lives on less than €2 a day.”

It was a far cry from the glittering streets of China’s financial capital, but O’Donoghue was so affected by the experience she decided to sign up again. “I feel humbled when faced with such strength of character. Some aspects of our western lives seem so insignificant in comparison,” she says. In September, she was posted to Afghanistan.

A sabbatical year was originally prescribed by Mosaic Law to be observed every seventh year as a sabbath during which the land was fallow and all debtors were to be released.These days, although still predominant in university circles, it is a voluntary arrangement whereby an employer gives an employee time off work — paid or unpaid — over and above their usual holiday allowance.

A sabbatical is a unique opportunity for companies as well as employees, according to Rowan Manahan, managing director of Fortify Services, a Dublin-based outplacement and career management firm. “It can be an equitable arrangement for both sides,” he says.

The kind of people taking sabbaticals, Manahan says, are those who have already achieved success within a company and are very clear about which direction their career is going. These can range from “players”, who have worked hard their whole lives, to those in middle management.

“Sabbaticals don’t happen to people who are just drifting along, following the current,” he says. “The kind of people I see contemplating them are thinking on much broader terms — five to seven years down the line.”

The choices available depend on time and resources. Some travel, some do voluntary work abroad, others learn a new skill or take time out to be with their families. Some people use the time to complete a personal project such as writing a book.

Martin Reilly, an audit director at Deloitte & Touche, Ireland’s largest multidisciplinary professional services firm, took 1999 off to travel.

Having achieved the title of audit manager, a career goal, Reilly thought it was the right time. “I was always career oriented. I started at Deloitte & Touche after graduating from Dublin City University in 1995 and worked my way up to a management position. It was important for me to establish myself before I took a career break.” Reilly visited America and Asia before taking a job in banking in Australia.

“I was more mature when I returned, more focused,” he says. His employers agreed and he was promoted to audit director three years after his return.

Deloitte & Touche says each case is looked at in detail before time off is given. If the employee is valuable to the company, it will accommodate that person as best it can. “A lot of the time when people have lived abroad, they bring back a fresh perspective,” says the company. It employs more than 700 people in Ireland and there are eight employees on sabbatical leave at the moment.

Times Recommends

• Blackstone target at $7.75bn on China deal
• An opportunity in the Muslim community
• BSkyB deal may spell trouble for Virgin