Careers advice

the_mixer

I am looking for advice about a career to take up in my late 40s. I could be a lost cause as I haven't worked for five years for health reasons, but I had previous experience in sales.

I am looking for a reasonably well paid job en route to retirement. Perhaps I'm being naive but I do have a degree and a good standard of written communication skills, am hard working and diligent.

I have thought about the following areas:
Mortgage adviser
IFA 

Perhaps being optimistic but I could study the cemap stuff and have experience in upselling etc. I am also willing to study for IFA exams and know they have a higher average age at the moment anyway, plus considering an economics degree at the OU.

Are there any other potential careers? Health and safety? Trading Standards, traffic management (a mate is well paid in this), public sector? Anything north of £25k quite quickly would be great. Anything you can start in your late 40s?

I hope I don't come across arrogant but I did undersell myself for years.

tacpot12

Hi, I don't have much advice to offer, but did want to encourage you. You need to get back into the working environment, which is going to be quite different to how you left it. 

With your experience in sales and good written skills, I would suggest you look at whether you could get into Bid Writing. One thing that this line of work has going for it is that Charities often need to bid for grants, and you may be able to get experience in the field by volunteering to help charities, especially small charities, to bid for grants. Hopefully you would be able to build up a portfolio of successful grant applications that you could use to talk your way into a paid role with a consultancy or other form of service provider that regularly has to repond to Invitations to Tender or Requests for Proposals.

Even if you go in at entry level, if your work brings results, you are likely to find your salary quickly rises to over well over £30K.

I think the main thing is to indentify an area of work that you are likely to enjoy.

I would not study at for an Economics degree at your age if the aim is to improve your employability. It is extremely time consuming, and only likely to be of financial benefit if you want a career working in a role that requires that specific degree.

StevenB12

Hello mate.

You have a lot of options open to you. It really all depend where your interests are and if you are willing to undergo training etc. You mentioned a few various jobs such as traffic management etc. I work in Utilities and I can tell you that Drainage is generally a very good avenue to take. It's a dirty job as you're working with sewage and definitely not for everyone. I did it for 9 years before going to fresh water. In general you can make anything from 25k-75k a year, depending on location/company/overtime etc. Drainage is a 24/7 game and overtime is 99.9 percent guaranteed, but as I said, its a dirt job often doing 60+ hours a week.

Massive shortage of wagon drivers at the moment in general. You can do your class 2 training all in for about 2k give or take on the training provider, and a lot of places are taking on drivers with no experience at the moment.

Health and Safety is a good one to get in to, but from personal experience I've found with this if you do health and safety say at site level, it can help if you have already come from that background. Go for your NEBOSH certificate, this can get you up to 40k a year, or you can free lance.

So many avenues open and age really is just a number these days for a lot of them.

Jillanddy

I would suggest you look at whether you could get into Bid Writing. One thing that this line of work has going for it is that Charities often need to bid for grants, and you may be able to get experience in the field by volunteering to help charities, especially small charities, to bid for grants. 

As someone who comes across bid writers an awful lot, my advice would be - don't bother. It's very hard to make a living at this, and frankly, given the quality of work that I see, not surprising. It is not as simple as "I can write well so I can write bids". Good bid writers need an in-depth understanding of multiple fields including management and organisation, finance, social policy, research and statistics. The difference between a volunteer with some experience writing a National Lottery bid for £12k (rather easy) and pulling together a complex consortium of funding to develop a major project is the difference between maths and quantum physics - they share some basics but the journey between the two is huge. Only the latter would net any payment for the work done. Bid writing / development is a complex job requiring significant background in the area. You don't just pick it up, it isn't really about selling, and besides which - most of the big money now is in tendering which needs all the bid writing skills plus a lot of law.