Voluntary Redundancy and a 6 Month Job Break As I Train For A New Career.....Help!

Hi guys,

I'm in a small pickle with my future and some help would be fantastic.

So let me paint the picture. I'm a single 34 year old chap from Essex who's been working for the same company Telecoms firm since i was 21. Now it's a fairly decent company but I must admit i've always planned to use it as a stop gap whilst my daughter was at school because when i split up with my partner (my daughters mother), i wanted to be there for my daughter and watch her grow up. Having this job allowed me to have my daughter stay over in the week, my job was local so it also allowed me to run my daughter to school in the mornings and it was very flexible so it was perfect. If i had to commute and work in London say, none of that would've been possible.

So now my daughter is 12 years old and is at Secondary School, i planned this year to be the year where i start to sort my career out and do something that i find interesting to do.....and that was to be a driving instructor. The reason being i have a good driving background, i was once a British Karting Champion back in the 90's where i even beat Lewis Hamilton and i even coached Prince William and Harry on 4 separate occasions. I now do the odd bit of part time driver coaching and still have a fairly well respected name in the the industry even some 20+ years after being crowned champion.

Now i was aiming to start my instructor training later in the year when suddenly my company lost a huge chunk of our National contract and this was followed by a huge organisation re-structure. So with this re-structure there was an announcement that over 100 staff had to be cut and redundancies were imminent. Obviously straight away fear set in for me and my fellow work colleagues as we feared for our future. One day, we all received an e-mail that we could get a Voluntary Redundancy quote to see what we would entitled and i was...pleasantly surprised by what i would be offered.

I think from that point onwards, my heart was straight away set on leaving the company. I also had 1 or 2 personal issues within the company (an ex partner being one of them) which made going to work...not quite as fun as it once was! Also future changes in the company will probably mean more jobs cuts in the future so there is a constant black cloud around the place.

So here I am today, i leave on Friday with my redundancy in my back pocket and i have driver instructor training in place thanks to my uncle who has his own driving school.

So here's where the advice is needed as i have 1 single worry. Now I was offered £11k in redundancy and i have some £3.5k in savings and my aim is not to get a full time job in order to give me extra time to train on being an instructor. Now you're probably going to ask "How long does it take to be fully qualified?" and this simple answer to that is....it all depends on how much time you put into it. For example if i was to start another full time job, it would probably take me a few years to be fully qualified as i'd have to do all my training and studying around the full time job...and my daughter.

My view is, if i'm sensible with my money could i do all the training and eventually be qualified....before the money runs dry? I'm aiming to be fully qualified in 6 months and i'll have my small part time coaching job bringing in a little bit of money coming in. Would i get help from the government? Would i be entitled to job seekers allowance? Would say getting a £10k loan for example, be a good idea before i'm totally unemployed just have that money to fall back on in case i do run out?

I don't have any debts but i do have to pay rent (550 a month rent), child maintenance and your usual bills such as running a car, mobile phone bill, gym membership etc.

So what do you guys think? Any advice or pointers from you guys or people who have been in a similar situation would be so helpful!

I'm petrified of waking up Monday morning jobless but i feel that i won't have a better chance to better myself than what i do now.

Sorry for the extremely long message.

Thank you for reading.
N.