Overall comment

Apart from the "natural progression" from learning at school to taking a job and making a career from it in order to be a useful member of society who can take a partner and raise a family of their own, perhaps you only need to learn enough to get by, work in any job you are satisfied with to earn enough to have a comfortable life, great holidays and happy people about you?

Sadly, it has become expected that everyone is formally trained and has a certificate that proves their training before a prospective boss will even have a chat with you to see if you could do the job (s)he needs to fill. Education is a good thing, but not if it trains everyone to think the same.

Work in retail

When I was still at school the teacher knew someone at one of the city's clothing stores, and they wanted some cheap labour to work in the store during busy periods so my working career began wrapping clothes purchases and doing general customer service. As I was a casual working Friday nights and Saturday mornings, my wages were better than some of the permanents. When I worked the full 5 1/2 day week during school holidays, I was paid the grand amount of $25 (before income tax!) As the outlet was quite friendly, and the staff all got along quite well, it was very pleasant to work there. I learnt that it didn't really matter what the job was, if the people were all positive and pleasant, you quite enjoyed your day at work.

A bunch of years later, I was in a hardware store and asked if they needed any part time or casual staff. I started working that Saturday morning as a casual! It turned out to be one of my most rewarding jobs! It was very satisfying when customers came in with some fragments of something they were trying to replace, or stories of what they were trying to do, and I was able to send them on their way with a smile and the things they needed. I had so many compliments (especially from ladies) who commented that they had NEVER received customer service as good as I gave them. This job taught me that exceeding a customer's expectations and getting that immediate feedback was a very satisfying feeling indeed. I also learnt that most retailers only allow minimal time for staff to interact with customers as they are expected to run and face floor stock with the bare minimum of staff numbers.

Retail is a crazy business that relies on making a favourable and lasting impression on each customer, but as a lot of the sectors of retail make minimal margin, the only way to improve profit is to dramatically reduce staffing numbers. The improved profit is seen as the driver of most retail businesses rather than the ecstatic customer who will bring all their return business and tell all their friends and relatives to also shop there.

Secondments

In large organisations you may find you are subject to secondments to other roles or into projects. The work you are seconded to do may be right up your alley and be something you are really good at and enjoy. Secondment means the role will finish at some point and you will be released back to where you came from. In an organisation that restructures a lot, you may find your old department dramatically changed or even disbanded whilst you have been away from it. For this reason, if you are career-minded it is paramount that you "network" and keep abreast of all job possibilities. Also keep your resume totally up-to-date and relevant so you can provide it at a moments notice. Even if your old department has not been restructured or disbanded in your time away, your old boss may have had to fill your role with another person. Things are never likely to be the same!

Apart from the preceding warnings, secondments into projects are good learning grounds as you will be exposed to other projects and aspects of your organisation than those you might normally deal with. You may get to deal with highly trained consultants, or even become highly trained yourself. Whatever happens, try to give the secondment role your all and learn from it whatever lessons can be learnt.

Train Driving

When I'd paid all my bills and had a little to spare in the bank, I decided one day that the job I had was a dead end one and that a change was necessary, so I resigned! I went down to the employment office the next day (when it was easier to find jobs) and saw a job card to be a train driver! I'd always admired the guys hanging out of the country trains when I was a kid, so I thought "Why not?".... This was a really good job. Lots of travel and although the hours were strange (to match when crews were needed for the various goods and passenger trains), the work was not hard!! Back then, there were relieving assignments where you got to stay at a country depot whilst someone else was on holidays. I met lots of interesting people, and got to practice my swearing and story telling. The pay was quite good (especially when bolstered by the living away from home allowance!)

A roster was published for the coming week so you could see who you'd be working with and which runs you were scheduled to do. If you had passenger runs or shifts in the local shunting yards, you could pretty much rely on them not going into overtime. If you had various goods runs, or were on standby, you could not schedule anything in your private life and guarantee to be there on time after your shift was meant to have finished. You also couldn't have had anything alcoholic within 12 hours of starting a shift.

A standard shift might entail starting at 2AM and running a goods train from Melbourne to Geelong and then bringing a passenger train back at 6AM. A shift started and finished at a depot, so the travel time from the depot to the train, and from the train back to the depot is all paid for. Some shifts you might be a standby crew that sat in the depot playing cards waiting for a job if some other crew rang in sick or needed to be relieved after an extra long shift. A couple of those were 8 hours of paid card playing! I think the longest shift I ever did was taking a passenger train down to Yarram and waiting there to return a goods train into Melbourne. The engine was late, and when we'd finished collecting all the goods wagons from the various sidings, dropping a few, and performing the various shunts required, we'd clocked up almost 13 hours by the time we were relieved.

As it was the responsibility of the crew to ensure the whole train was in a safe and working order, a walk around of the wagons was usually performed every time some more were added from a siding. This was to ensure the hand brakes had been released, the air line between each wagon connected, and the valves all opened so the air brakes would work properly. (Also to check the valve was closed on the last wagon or the guard's van and that a white disk and/or red tail light were visible.)

For those after some of the technical details - most of the country trains are hauled by locomotives that are diesel-electric powered. The diesel engine drives a generator that powers some enormous electric traction motors. Some classes of diesel-electric locomotive have the electric traction motors linked in parallel to improve low speed torque, and at higher speeds power is supplied to these motors in a series configuration.

The controls were also pretty basic. A lever was for the locomotive's own brakes. Another lever was for the brakes on the whole train. Both of these had air lines feeding in and out of them. A third lever was for the direction you wanted the locomotive to go (forward or backward only as the steering is all done externally by the tracks!) The fourth lever had 9 notches. At one end was "idle", and the notch at the other end was "flat out"! ;-) Apart from that, there were a few switches for things like lights, a few gauges and there was also a speed recorder. A foot operated switch on the floor operated a sand hopper on the leading side of each locomotive wheel. This was to improve traction between the steel wheels and steel track during braking and accelerating (particularly up a slope with a large load in tow.)

A locomotive's crew was a driver and a fireman. In the days of steam, the fireman tended the fire under the boiler as well as being an assistant driver. In my days, the fireman was an extra set of eyes and a trainee driver. Everyone starts off as an Engineman Class 1 after 2 weeks classroom training and some tests. At Engineman Class 3 level, you are allowed to drive some goods trains with an Enginemen of a higher class on board.

To ensure the crew remained vigilant while the locomotive's brakes were not applied, a vigilance control was installed for both the driver and fireman. The driver had to press a lit button every time it beeped (about once every 5 minutes), and the fireman had to press and hold a pressure relief valve for 10 seconds every time it built up pressure to cause a whistle inside the locomotive cabin to go off (about once every 3 minutes). If either vigilance control was not responded to correctly, the train's brakes would be applied. If the fireman either didn't respond in time, or pressed the pressure relief valve for too long, the whistle inside the locomotive cabin was so loud that it hurt your ears!

I really enjoyed the travel and interactions with people I'd normally never associate with. The lack of being able to plan a social life around the shifts did have drawbacks though. And one other thing - the shift controllers were tough! If you didn't ring in at least 4 hours before your shift start to notify of intention to not turn up, you would be docked the pay for that shift. I got knocked off my motorbike on the way in to work one day and they dragged me off to hospital (just in case!) As well as the hurt pride and scratches on my bike, I lost a days pay!

Used Car Salesman

A mate of mine worked for 10 or so years at a car yard doing odd jobs and cleaning cars. One day he asked if he could have a go at selling the cars. He turned out to be their best sales person! He arranged for me to have an interview and next thing I was selling used cars! The yard I got to work in only had the manager and me working at it. The manager liked to talk about his sexual conquests, and expected me to enlighten him with stories of my feats as well. I didn't play his game, and found myself back out in the street after only 2 weeks. I'd sold 5 cars in that fortnight and got commission for 2 of those!

I enjoyed the customer interaction. I told people what the good and bad points were with each car and got them to make up their own mind as to which was the best fit for the dollars they wanted to spend. In a lot of cases there were no matching cars on the lot as it was quite small, and most of the cars were more worthy of going to the wreckers than to go back out on the road again!

Apart from finding how cut throat some people can be, the main lesson learnt from this job: "If you never ask, you never know"!

I've read somewhere that the easiest person to sell to is another salesperson!

Project Manager

My training to become a Project Manager was the proverbial "Trial by Fire". The last chap given charge of Year 2000 for all the Information Technology (IT) systems at a large retailer took another job and left a vacancy that had to be filled in a hurry. The middle level manager who was asked to recommend a replacement (back in the days when jobs were still filled by attrition) told me that he was looking for someone with "terrier-like qualities" and I sprang to mind! It was sort of a "right time, right position" situation that I grasped with both hands and worked my butt off making sure all the risk was addressed in the next 18 months.

If you know anything about the time leading up to the 1st of January, 2000, you'll know that only the people and systems you hadn't got to would be caught out when their calendar functions didn't work correctly. If the 1st of January 2000 came and went like just another day, then you'd done your job properly!

I had a small team directly reporting to me, and some test hardware that I needed to control. The people who looked after the systems and ultimately needed to perform the testing of them worked for other managers and were largely unconcerned that their systems would fail. That wasn't sufficient for senior management, and I had to find ways to get all the systems and interfaces checked and tested. Lots of negotiation!

My next challenge was looking after a support team for a big retailer. The team was responsible for the 24x7 support of all the Head Office reference and pricing information which got sent to all the stores. When I first took over the team, there were 4 trainees and 4 tired contractors. The trainees didn't know enough to be able to provide after hours support, and the contractors were tired of carrying the pager every fourth week as it used to go off quite often. I had to quickly understand who was capable of what, what the computer systems were trying to do, where the instability points were, and identify what I was allowed to do about the whole mess! My management added some additional challenges - convert from a reliance on contractors to permanent staff, and reduce the frequency and severity of the problems whilst also reducing costs. If that wasn't enough, I was also given charge of another team who were testing the GST program changes. In order to deliver on all of this, I ended up getting offside with my management (bad move), but made sure that my ultimate customer was very happy with the service they were getting. I worked on getting the correct contractors in this team for delivery; promoted trainees as fast as I could get them skilled up, and manoeuvred non-performers into other areas. This was a thankless job which involved me also carrying a pager and being on call 24x7.

A previous manager asked me if I would be interested in a job back with him. I asked what it was and was told a Project Manager and "apprentice" to the Technical Manager in the area as he would be retiring in a few years time. The Technical Manager is not interested in having an apprentice, so he found ways to avoid working with me on any part of his job. The projects in this area are to do with business-to-business e-commerce, or sending business documents electronically from application systems in one organisation to application systems in another organisation. This was quite interesting and varied. The work involved mapping EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) standards into a Gateway tool, working with suppliers and areas of a retail business on new electronic business documents, and providing information on what was available on the Internet. 

Taxi Driver

To become a cab driver means going for a cab driver's test, then getting a shift driving a cab for one of the cab owners. Most cab companies provide training for getting the license (for a fee). I got my license (which was a bit nerve racking, but the tester helped me through!) and then got the night shift for one of the owners. There were no clues on which ranks to sit on and when in order to get the regular jobs. This was all stuff you needed to pick up on the job.

I tried everything from city ranks to Tullamarine and over to Dandenong (which I was told I was not allowed to take a fare from), but failed to take more than $70 in fares for a whole week. As the cab owner was so annoyed I was not earning a whole lot more, I didn't end up taking my $35 half share for the week before I threw in the towel as "too hard".

So it cost me for the cab license, plus my whole week's (night shift) work went unpaid!

Clerical Assistant

A Clerical Assistant is someone who gets to shuffle paper around that is paid less than a Clerk and usually because they have no qualifications. I tried my hand at being a Clerical Assistant a couple of times, and both times it was only for a few months.

The first attempt was for a big national employer. I got to count bits of paper that got sent in from the branches (which had been counted there before they were sent), in order to reconcile national figures. The job was not very rewarding, and the chap who sat behind me used to crack jokes all day. I struggled to keep my place in the silly bits of paper, and one day I turned around and asked him to please stop with the jokes. The supervisor of the area decided I was a troublemaker from this! I suggested that as I was not enjoying the Clerical Assistant Grade 2 job, perhaps they could demote me into a different position? They initially suggested I should resign. The next morning, I was whisked away into a different area and given the demotion.

As a Clerical Assistant Grade 1, I was responsible for helping with a mail run, and nothing much else. The guy before me (whom they had promoted into my old job) had failed to get anything much done in this role, but by 10AM I was asking for more work. By the end of a few weeks I was that far in front with my work, and had cleaned out an old store room and organised it into a useful area again. I was getting bored and actively looked for alternate employment.

My second attempt at being a Clerical Assistant was for a large automobile manufacturer. Sadly, again the work was almost menial. It was all about shuffling bits of paper for each of the basic components that made up each part of a new model. There were no pictures or anything exciting about being involved in a new car's production, just numbers and names on sheets of paper. On my way to work for day 7, I was cleaned up off my motorbike and never succeeded in going back there.

Being Unemployed

I remember my father being retrenched when he was 50. It took him 9 months to finally get a job again. He was one big ball of stress for all of that time, so it was not a time that he (or anyone near him) got to enjoy.

My sister decided to move to a seaside town and thought it would be "easy as" to get another job. She also took almost a year to gain employment and it was back in the city a couple of hundred kilometres away.

Following on from the motorbike crash I was in, I was out of work and deemed "unemployable" as it was never really known when I would have to go back into hospital for further operations. It was such a relief when a large company took a chance on me and offered me employment.

I remember those days of being unemployable. Getting up in time to watch the 11 o'clock news on the little black and white TV, and having the highlight of my week being related to some TV show. Not having enough money to go out anywhere and not wanting to stay at home either.

Until you've tried it for yourself it can seem to be an enticing thing to be able to get up whenever you want and just do things to your own schedule. It is actually not at all like holidays from work.

If you want to claim unemployment benefits you will have to front at the unemployment office and you will have to be actively looking for employment. You will find that your days are very busy doing things that seem to be totally demoralising. As you may not be feeling too good about yourself, it will be harder than ever to make some prospective new boss think you're the greatest thing they have ever seen.

Earning money from the Internet?

Unlike some of the income earning sites on the Internet, the following are free to join

Whilst there are not technically a form of employment, can you actually make it worth your while to do  things on the Internet that will earn enough to retire, or work from home? emailcash is touted as a fun way of earning money while you're actually using the Internet. Yes, you earn money, but I'm still waiting to earn enough to get to the first level of reward - I don't think I'll be able to throw my daytime job in! Shona has earnt more from it than me, but it is more like play money than anything serious.

I joined up with pureprofile at the same time as I joined emailcash. Again, I'm not going to be able to retire on my earnings from this, but I have already had two rewards and I'm quite happy with the amount I earn from this compared to the time I need to invest in it.

What is pureprofile? "It is the world’s first real Reverse Search Engine, which basically means you get to tell businesses exactly what you are looking to buy then they do the searching for you and make you their best offers!

Businesses need your attention and feedback and pureprofile makes sure they value it because every time a business chooses to send you an offer or ask you a few questions, you are instantly paid at least $1.00 - just for giving your opinion! Your privacy is protected because pureprofile ensures all your requests and responses are anonymous." ... Copied from their referral message.

The idea is you create a profile about yourself, and when your profile matches the demographic that businesses want the opinion of, pureprofile will send you an on-line survey.

I don't think I match the most popular demographic so the frequency of me getting a survey is probably less than others.

If you ever thought you'd like to put a story or two up on the web, or you have a brilliant idea and wondered how to get it hosted, perhaps this is a solution that will get you underway? doteasy hosting plans are free if you register your domain name with them (or move it over to them). Apart from the domain registration, there are no other costs.

You may want more space, or have a large amount of traffic, or have the need for more features? The plan prices that doteasy have are also quite reasonable.

If you have your own website, you may consider having targeted advertising (such as Google Adsense) as part of it. Depending on how popular your website is and how many people click on the advertisements, the earnings may at least offset the costs of running the site.

If you think the adverts on your site are okay, you can also earn a "spotter's fee" if you refer someone else and they sign up.

Trainee Fast Food Outlet Manager

I even had a go at donning a uniform and learning the fast food trade. There really was nothing glamorous about this. It was hard and constant work with long shifts and the expectation that you would also come in on your days off to help unload any deliveries.

When I told my Head Office contact that my wife wanted us to head north and pursue a self employment opportunity, I was given the interesting response by my Human Resources contact lady of, "Are you sure you shouldn't let your wife take that opportunity by herself and you stay on with us to build your career here?" Whilst I was horrified at the suggestion at the time, it turns out that she was actually correct (and could have saved me a whole heap of money if I had listened to her!)

Summary

In these days of greater competition for each vacancy, make sure you have your next job secured before you leave the previous one.

Be aware that some new jobs have a probationary period. It will invariably allow the management to dismiss you if they feel things are not working out. You may also find they can dismiss you without having to pay you!

Part of what most employers are looking for is how well you'll fit in with the rest of the team. Make sure you impress them with how you can communicate at all levels.

An interesting thing I learnt from my current boss and it's something I hadn't overly considered - they expect whoever they hire to be able to walk in and just do the job. This mindset means that he would only ever be satisfied with an employee who already knows the job back to front. When I had staff, I wanted people who were reliable and up to the challenge of the role and could grow into it. I naively thought that every boss was meant to find people who were eager and capable and help to shape them to meet all the challenges of a job.