Kay Chalmers earned her BA in Economics from UCC in 1992 and a post-graduate diploma in Business from LSB (now the Dublin Business School) in 1993.   She trained as a chartered accountant with KPMG in Edinburgh qualifying with the Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants in 1997. She worked with the NHS in Scotland and was appointed  Deputy Director of Finance of an NHS Trust with a £30m budget. Returning to Ireland in 1999 Kay worked as a senior accountant with Apple Computers, lectured in taxation and accounting at Cork Institute of Technology CIT and as a management consultant did financial forecasting and business planning for start up businesses.  After 10 years experience working in practice providing accounting, tax and business advice to a wide variety of SMEs in Cork she launched Chalmers Accounting and Consulting in 2020.