Change of career

lostmyname

A family member wants to change his career. He has been a manager for large/corporate organisations and civil service, earning a nice wage but working for many years under a lot of pressure, being available at all hours, etc etc never been able to switch off adding some recent personal struggles with mental health, he does not want to get trapped in a rat race anymore.

He now wants to find a new job that is just a job, he dosnt want a career progress or any responsabilities, somewhere he can just clock in do his hours and clock out, no pressure to stay behind, no out of hours calls and all that shabang.

As you can imagine his CV is very professional with a personal statement reflecting his drive and motivation in the past, so my question is, how do you change a personal statement to say in a pro fessional way that he wants to 'downgrade' or take a job where he'll be over qualified?

What reason can he give for wanting to make a complete u turn on his career?

Thank you

DullGreyGuy

Its normally badged as a change in work/life balance 

gwynlas

He could say that as the pressure to fund family life as eased that he now wishes to  take a step back from  that life and be able to spend more quality time pursuing other interests. However he might find that coming from a management background that he will automatically be evaluating the workplace and again take on a supervisory role.It really depends on what he sees as transferable skills and rewrites his personal statement to reflect what is needed in the new post.

Robin9

Talking to our ASDA delivery driver last week. Had been in Retail Management, voluntarily gave up - now enjoying new job

DigSunPap

As above says - work/life balance would be the best way to go

lostmyname

gwynlas said:

He could say that as the pressure to fund family life as eased that he now wishes to  take a step back from  that life and be able to spend more quality time pursuing other interests. However he might find that coming from a management background that he will automatically be evaluating the workplace and again take on a supervisory role.It really depends on what he sees as transferable skills and rewrites his personal statement to reflect what is needed in the new post.

Thank you, that's very helpful. You are right in saying that he may take on a supervisory role as the current role started off as a regular employee but his knowledge and method of working and leadership was spotted by management and he was promoted twice. He thought long and hard about accepting as he started to realise that he was going to end up on the same slippery road, but at the same time did not want to look bad by turn it down. He has defenitely learnt his lesson now and wont do that again.

DullGreyGuy

It's a fine tightrope to walk... people want someone that is committed to the job, not someone they think is talking it to just fill a gap before they get their next senior manager job. Sometimes people looking for the step down can also come across as fairly derogatory about the job they're apply for... had a former COO apply for a £100,000 PM job I was advertising and he was going on about wanting an easy job that he could do in his sleep etc.

It's also worth noting that bottom rung jobs can be very stressful too, just in a different way to senior management jobs. There can be fairly tight KPIs you have to achieve, the level of oversight from others is much greater and you can be constantly whipped for not achieving KPIs. On the one hand if he doesn't financially need to work then maybe he can be relaxed and not care if he is let go because he cannot achieve the 5 second AHT that Directory Enquiries require but again an employer will want someone who does care and does try.