career change

[Harryturbs]

So I'm 26 YO and have 6 years as a car sales executive under my belt.

Before that I worked an admin job and then a customer services role at Vodafone.

I have 13 GCSEs A-C.

I need a career change after coming back from travelling for 6 months.

I'd like to earn £25-30k to start off with career progression opportunies.

I have a few ideas of what I'd like to do but always looking for others.

I don't want to work weekends (well maybe one or two here and there).

I'd quite like a varied schedule - not sat at a desk every day 9-5 ideally.

I live in Nottingham.

Any suggestions...

[mike-r]

Good luck finding an ordinary vacancy starting at 25-30k. Obviously I don't know the details of your experience but I'm a similar age and couldn't find that for love nor money (well, maybe love).

Graduate schemes will roll around soon, something in agriculture always enamoured me, I believe the National Trust runs a grad scheme as well. Plenty of progression and the chance to be outside at least some of the time. Of course I never have the motivation to apply to more than 2 or 3 grad schemes per year so I currently work at a desk.

I'm currently waiting on my marching orders to begin work as a freight train driver, which is a career that appeals to me greatly, but there isn't much room for progression and the skills are fairly non-transferable, but concerns me this does not.

[Harryturbs]

Yeah I appreciate that I'm unlikely to walk into a £30k salary job but something with commission would be achievable.

Did you get into the train driver role through reading it on here? Seems interesting but like you say, no real career progression but reasonably decent pay.

Thanks for the advice.

Currently trawling the web reading bits and bobs and seeing whats out there...

[mike-r]

You work in a commission based-job so I imagine you have a better idea of the environment more than me, but I wouldn't personally put any stock in OTE. Totaljobs is full of 'base salary £16k, £60k OTE' nonsense which one could reasonably refute. Even if that is true and you're funding an expected-earnings-lifestyle what do you do when foot traffic drops one month or something.

I have a friend who's a train driver and linked to a vacancy one day, and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to do it and the more sense it made. Never really had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, if you do I'd say go for that and ignore the pay as much as you can.

I don't know know how many other freight train drivers will have Masters degrees, but I'd sooner do what I want rather than what I can

[Phil117]

Have you thought about going back into car sales?

I know you said you don't want to work weekends; you could always try working in fleet.

I'm a VW fleet, and we only work the odd Saturday if there a new registration coming out and theres handovers which need doing, or special events etc.

There are fleet sales execs earning around 35-40 OTE. There is also a broke guy who just quotes all day, and takes around 70k home as he does around 1000 cars a year. Never see's them, just quotes.

Edited by Phil117 on Wednesday 7th May 22:08