Retraining for Payroll

[Dontbeme]

I have worked in admin and insurance for years and have started training for a change into Payroll, I'm in Ireland and QQI level 5 done, covid delayed start of QQI level 6 but hoping to start soon. Has anyone any advice on how to gain payroll experience, any jobs I see all want a years experience at least. I am willing to volunteer to gain this experience, feeling a bit deflated at my lack of progress as everywhere wants experience and I can't get my foot in the door.

Hi @Dontbeme, we're just giving your thread a bump in case anyone's around to give you some advice.

Not sure about in Ireland but I run a payroll team now, I started out around 6 years ago w- I worked in an admin role and one of my jobs was collating timesheets and inputting those into a spreadsheet to send to the external payroll accountant, I would also check the payslips and calculate SMP etc. My next job after this, on my CV I emphasised the payroll side of the work I had done and also got some Sage Payroll training, I was brought into my current employer 4 years ago as a payroll administrator, as we have grown I have become more senior and now run a team of 3 and no longer do very much of the actual processing side of things.

Have you done ANY payroll related activities in your previous jobs?

also, our local council run payroll apprenticeships - if this something which may be available where you are?

HR Service Centre jobs typically have a cross over with payroll. Anyone showing an interest is usually offered development as most people don’t want to do payroll.

Thank you both for replying, I have no payroll adjacent tasks in previous roles. I worked in insurance admin and processed payments, bank reconciliations, set up direct debits for new and existing policies and the like. I was hoping to get payroll experience as there are a lot of small businesses in my area that require someone to do payroll for a few hours a week, nothing full-time and hoped to set this up as a part-time option closer to retirement.

Small businesses will want someone with experience as they will want one person doing the payroll end to end for the entire company, they won't have a team or anyone able to train usually, the best 'in' would be with a bigger firm, doing small parts of payroll administration, I work within an accountancy practice so we run payroll for hundreds of clients - the main consideration is that someone with no experience would be brought in on a data entry basis on around NMW

Only HR roles would have payroll tasks. As @QforCucumber said you need a large employer with a big HR department.