If you started out in basic financial service job- what do you do now?

[mrstickletum]

I'm starting a new job in this area, call
Centre. Im hoping it leads me into a new career pathway as I'd really like to get into a professional setting ( current ly hospitality) if you started off in this type of work what do you do now, or what type of jobs become available to people in this line of work?

I did my career change to data at 37, my colleague did at 40. If anything our transferable skills from previous roles made up more valuable to interviewers not less

@Letitrainletitrainletitrain that's brilliant to know actually. I always wrongly assume that people graduated at 24 and started their high flyer careers after. This really encourages me! Thank you

@Letitrainletitrainletitrain when you say data, what do you do on a daily basis?

I started out as an accounts assistant in accounts payable. Regularly had to interact with the procurement team. Moved across into procurement when an admin role was advertised. Now very senior procurement leader. It took 13 years and study to gain additional procurement qualifications but my salary has gone from just above min wage to almost 6 figures in that time.

I started out in the cal centre.
I then moved internally to be a debt counsellor.
I am now an internal auditor.

The advice I would give is look for secondments within the company. Push yourself out of your comfort zone.

Seek feedback all the time.
You will progress.

I dragged my feet and got too comfortable. I should have pushed myself sooner and I think I would have achieved more.

I do a combination of data analysis and Bi development

Data analysis is a combination of advanced excel skills and some programming (python, and sql in my case) to look for patterns or anomalies in data. I also do some machine learning which uses datasets to teach algorithms to look for patterns.

Then BI development is building dashboards to display data in a useful and insightful way If you go on a government website that shows you statistics in charts and graphs, that's a BI developer whose done that. It also uses coding but can be a bit easier to learn.

The starting salary is normally between 30-40k I'm currently on 50k after about 2 years and I am looking to get to 60k this year so it's a good pay progression.

Also don't be put off (a some people are) by coding if you are interested in data, if you are a logical person (or a knitter) it's actually quite accessible and straightforward

@Letitrainletitrainletitrain gosh that sound terrifying lol you have done so well. I'm not particularly great with maths and my excel knowledge is basically zero so there's probably not much hope for me lol 😂

I count on my fingers and panic when numbers get past 10,000...

Excel skills are straight forward to learn and come in useful in many roles so it would probably be good pick up some even if you don't want to go into data

Essentially things like simple formulas, vlookups and pivots tables. (and if it makes you feel any better 6 years ago I had no idea how to do pivot tables or v lookups!)

But have a think about your skills and what you think appeals to you. My sister started in a call centre and ended up in project management, because she found she was really good at working to deadlines and budgets for example.

What I found useful was to say yes to every opportunity, and every time they needed someone to do something extra. It might not have bought me extra pay or recognition immediately but it gave the the opportunity to work with other people in the business and see what roles appealed to me.

And then when I wanted to go into data I got the job purely on the fact that the manager of the team had worked with me, knew I worked hard and was intelligent and so he took a chance on me even though I had no experience.

I’m now Head of Marketing in financial services. Took further qualifications alongside work in my own time and worked my way up. Good luck.

@Letitrainletitrainletitrain you sound extremely worth while getting to know. You've given me so much to look into. Thank you. I am going to play about with some YouTube videos to see what I can learn and it'll give me a taste of what it's all
About.

I think my skill set is leaning towards customer/ people but I'm keen to learn and develop news skills. It's only when you post on here you realise just how many opportunities there are out there, it's fascinating. I'm starting this new job on 22k ( I know it's rubbish) but I would love to really push myself and grow. I think I would like to aim for 30k in say 2 years time ( maybe I'm aiming to big but who cares lol)

@fiorentina that's also interesting. I forget that even a financial service company would have a marketing department. May I ask what you do on a typical
Day?

Good luck OP!
Interesting thread. I think this might be a decent route for DS. He has ok A Levels but no degree. Looking for something where he can use his initiative to work his way up.
Are these bank customer service call centres ?

What I would say is if you are good with people don't rule out tech roles, there are non tech roles within tech departments like project managers, scrum masters, product owners, delivery leads etc.

But what tech departments are often crying out for is people with people skills because traditionally technically roles tend to attract more introverted less peopley people. So if you can get a foot in the door you will be snapped up because of your people skills. And tech roles generally are well paid/better paid even if its a non tech role.

My friend is a scrum master and delivery lead. She is responsible for making sure the right people pick up the right work at the right time and that work gets delivered when it's promised in an adaptable way. And for that (no coding no tech skills) she gets paid £65k. But the skills are very similar to what a manager of an admin team might do, or any kind of co ordinator. They are just more formalised into a tech role.

Other people facing roles are things like business analyst (understanding processes) marketing, customer experience (these are the people who understand what makes customers happy or unhappy and why) complaints etc

30k in 2 years sounds very achievable

Typical day really varies - events, PR, client communications, internal communications, helping with pitches. We are a small team.

The other thing I don't think anyone mentioned is HR, you might need to do additional qualifications for this but quite often companies are happy to support this.

Our company has a HR help desk, so someone with people and customer skills and phone skills would get snapped up for this role. You are unlikely to get paid much more than you are on now but there's a lot of scope to branch out. For example we have an administrator in charge of our graduate and apprentice schemes so her year is spent recruiting new graduates etc and supporting them through the scheme.

However it's worth looking at what roles pay what when considering your future. I moved into data because its a traditionally male role and so it pays well even at the lower levels

Roles that have more women in them traditionally (call centres, HR, marketing) can pay less at the lower roles.

However on the flip side if that if you really want to progress to executive levels there are a ton more Chief People Officers that are women than there are CTOs. it's more common for women to progress higher in HR, finance sometimes, legal and marketing I think that's changing but still if you look around most large companies this is currently the case.

This is obviously a very sweeping statement and there will be plenty of companies that buck this trend but its worth considering.

I started as a temp assistant in financial services, working in recoveries/collections department. I was a law graduate, hoping to get a training contract, but I got made permanent 9 months later so I decided to stick around for a bit. 13 years later (during which I had two periods of maternity leave and gained 2 promotions) I am a Risk & Compliance manager. I've also just finished a 2 year apprenticeship (paid by my employers) at the age of 42 so it's definitely never too late to hit the textbooks if it will help with your future career.

Started as a cashier in a bank branch (£13k), now a deputy head of a financial crime compliance team (£70k). 10 years to get from one to another.

I do have a degree, but it’s completely unrelated. Lots of my colleagues don’t. It’s rare we hire externally, everyone started in the call centre.

I was early 30s when I started in banking. I know one other person who did the same and has moved up.

I did work quite obsessively, never turned down an opportunity to learn a new task, accepted high stress roles, changed jobs often, rarely had a sick day or annual leave and did a lot of overtime.

Some people I worked with early on are still in the exact same roles because they openly didn't want the stress of progressing.

I also have a completely unrelated degree in an arts subject. I got into banking a few years after graduating.

My last three jobs have used it, since I'm in a role where I do a lot of investigation and communicate with a broad spectrum of businesses and people.

The first few were mostly excel based.

DH started in the call centre for a car insurer. Now he owns his own loss adjusting company with 30+ staff and takes on trainees with zero experience in claims handling and puts them through all their exams and trains them to fully qualified

@Letitrainletitrainletitrain you have been incredibly helpful to me! I had actually thought about HR so that's a potential pathway or at least a thought. I suppose I'll get a better feel for things once I start the job and see what avenues become available and pique my interest.

My husband is really high up in IT so I know how well paid and how in demand those skills are.

One last question... did you move jobs a lot or did you move internally?

@CMOTDibbler that's fantastic!!! He's done so well. It's amazing the opportunity that becomes available if you're willing to work hard!

head of change in a financial services company ( I manage a team of project managers). Started off doing data entry stuff then moved to manage teams, then applied for a project manager role, progressed to programme manager and then to this role.

I moved internally twice, one to management within the callcentee/admin team and then once to the data. Then I got made redundant so I moved to a data team with another financial services organisation