Struggling to find a job paying £20+

snowqueen555

Hi all, I am struggling to find a job that pays around £20k. I have no problem in getting interviews (I write applications well), but it seems I always fulfill the essential criteria, but not the desirable ones, so always lack experience.

It seems to me once a job pays more than £18k they really expect you to have a lot of experience under your belt. I guess the labour market is very tough for unskilled workers.

I don't have a career or any specialist knowledge I am just shooting for general admin/clerical/finance/office roles.

At the moment I am in a basic finance role and it's all I seem to be able to get a sniff at, but I am trying to move out of this area as finance at the entry level is not for me.

Any feedback or suggestions? Thank you

-EDIT - Title should pay 20k!

TELLIT01

Assuming you are 25 or above minimum wage for a 40 hour week is around £16.3k. You are looking for approximately 25% more than that in a general admin role with no specialist knowledge. I think you will have difficulty finding that, at least as the start point.
My wife works in a similar type of role at an insurance company, has over 40 years experience in that work and still earns below the figure you are seeking. In previous employment she did earn a higher figure but the job market is different these days.
I would suggest setting you sights slightly lower in order to get through the door, then work to develop those areas you are currently lacking in.

ACG

Start in a job paying £18k, get some experience?

To be fair to the employer, why would they pay you £20k if they can pay someone experienced the same money? Get the experience, get your head down and earn the pay rises and promotions, if they do not come, use your experience and annual reviews to get a job elsewhere.

Unless you know someone prepared to hand it to you on the plate or you get lucky there is no magic answer. You just have to do what the majority of other people do and start at the bottom and work your way up. It wont come overnight but set yourself a target of say 2 years and see where you are at. Sometimes you need to look at the bigger picture.

Comms69

snowqueen555 wrote: »

Hi all, I am struggling to find a job that pays around £20k. I have no problem in getting interviews (I write applications well), but it seems I always fulfill the essential criteria, but not the desirable ones, so always lack experience. - what experience do you have?

It seems to me once a job pays more than £18k they really expect you to have a lot of experience under your belt. I guess the labour market is very tough for unskilled workers. - Well yes and no. It depends on which sector you're working in

I don't have a career or any specialist knowledge I am just shooting for general admin/clerical/finance/office roles. - In many places that kind of role would be in the 15-18k bracket; not 20k+.

At the moment I am in a basic finance role and it's all I seem to be able to get a sniff at, but I am trying to move out of this area as finance at the entry level is not for me.

Any feedback or suggestions? Thank you

-EDIT - Title should pay 20k!

You need to either risk entry level role at a different employer or gain qualifications in a desired field.

pmduk

As above, spend your spare time studying for qualifications to add value to your CV

Doshwaster

Check out your local college to see what courses they offer - accountancy, IT, business administration are all useful for office admin jobs. If you are unemployed then many will be free or have reduced fees. Once you find an entry level job you need to find one which will help you gain more qualifications.

[Deleted User]

Apply for jobs that don't pay £20k but will provide you with skills you need to get the 'desirable' skills needed to get that £20k job. Presumably you know what these skills are, and what sort of jobs will provide them.

Even doing extra work on a voluntary basis will help. Once I got a job because I did part time interviewing as a student. Its sometimes surprising what helps.

Gavin83

Where do you live?

Exodi

So my two first immediate thoughts were;

You're interested in an unskilled admin/clerical office role for 20k+? Even in the South East of England there are only a few roles that will offer this (as there are countless people fresh into employment that would be willing and able to do the same work for less than 16k). It's not coincidence that more specialised roles (or ones that require a plethora of experience) pay more as there are less people suitable to do these roles.

Which leads me to my second thought, if you were applying for these higher end admin roles and you are indeed getting interviews for them, then it would seem your problems lie at the interview stage - they obviously thought you were qualified enough based on your CV to offer you an interview? I remember a few years back I was invited to a third interview stage for a National Account Manager job for a massive multi-national organisation and was aware it was between me and one more candidate. I didn't end up getting the job and asked for open feedback about why - turns out the other candidate had prepared a full blown presentation with ideas/plans and trading data from their website. At first I felt it was unfair, I mean who prepares a powerpoint for a job interview? But then I come to realise the person who was offered a job did. My point is, make yourself stand out above all the other candidates, prepare memorable answers for "tell us about yourself" and "why should we hire you" - don't just reel off the standard "I'm a committed, motivated, reliable, independent, organised individual who ZZZZZZZ"

I'd imagine you're also doing this (as you mentioned you're good at applications) but I'd be clever in making sure that instead of saying "I answered the phone in my previous role and photocopied documents to send to them" you jazz it up to "I acted as the main point of contact between costumers and the sales team, and ensured that queries were dealt with in their entirety in a time efficient manner." - I'm sure you can do better than that but you get the idea.

I'd also do some research into the specifics of an application, if I took a typical Admin job spec and quickly scanned through it, I wouldn't imagine I could do the job (I'm a Senior Manager) but there is a copious amount of jargon used for basic functions. Some examples off the top of my head;

"must be experienced in the usage and utilisation of a CRM system" - overly fancy way of saying you should be able to use whatever computer system they use, they wouldn't expect you to specifically have used Microsoft Dynamics AX, for example, before.
"must be experienced in dealing with KPI's and attaining targets" - KPI's are just made up targets managers use to keep themselves in jobs, you could say you had KPI's in your last role to respond to customer emails the same day or something...

Already typed too much, good luck!!

Doshwaster

Exodi wrote: »

So my two first immediate thoughts were;

You're interested in an unskilled admin/clerical office role for 20k+? Even in the South East of England there are only a few roles that will offer this (as there are countless people fresh into employment that would be willing and able to do the same work for less than 16k). It's not coincidence that more specialised roles (or ones that require a plethora of experience) pay more as there are less people suitable to do these roles.

Which leads me to my second thought, if you were applying for these higher end admin roles and you are indeed getting interviews for them, then it would seem your problems lie at the interview stage - they obviously thought you were qualified enough based on your CV to offer you an interview? I remember a few years back I was invited to a third interview stage for a National Account Manager job for a massive multi-national organisation and was aware it was between me and one more candidate. I didn't end up getting the job and asked for open feedback about why - turns out the other candidate had prepared a full blown presentation with ideas/plans and trading data from their website. At first I felt it was unfair, I mean who prepares a powerpoint for a job interview? But then I come to realise the person who was offered a job did. My point is, make yourself stand out above all the other candidates, prepare memorable answers for "tell us about yourself" and "why should we hire you" - don't just reel off the standard "I'm a committed, motivated, reliable, independent, organised individual who ZZZZZZZ"

Asking interviewees in advance to prepare a presentation is common enough, especially in jobs which require presenting to customers (and it's a good way of putting off timewasters) but doing one unpromoted certainly shows some initiative. The risk is that you make look like a bit of a nutter but you will certainly stand out.

I always think that a CV gets you the interview but once you get into that room it really doesn't matter. Most people who get to the formal interview stage are probably capable of doing the job. The interview is more about whether you are the sort of person they want to be working with (and equally are they the sort of business you want to work for). In small companies especially it is important that you able fit in.

snowqueen555

Maybe I needed to be more clear, they are not just admin roles. I've been targeting local authority/civil service as that is where I am currently on fixed term, so a lot of these admin/clerical roles are in various dept e.g. transport/licensing/finance/welfare/defense requiring two areas of knowledge. My current role is £19k in a finance admin role, the next payscale begins at £21k. I was hoping to move into another role at my current scale or higher, but I am having trouble. Ideally I'd like to move out of finance, but will stick with it if it's all I can get. At the moment I am covering leave so they would like to keep me on but don't have the budget.

I think everyone is right, I do need more experience, it is just tough as I am just not competitive enough. This is just another push to retraining, but I don't know what to do unfortunately. public sector has seen 1% payrises for the past 10 years, so the sector is very underpaid at the moment, and a lot of competition for these roles. In the long run I'd like to begin a career with more capacity for wage growth.

I am in the South.

Thank you all for your replies.