totally OT as always but...

In news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net, Vamp wittered on forthwith;

I can't advise you on what to do as I've never known exactly what I've wanted to do with my life, so I can't really help you decide what to do with yours.

I am self-employed, my years in the motor trade have given me a lot of contacts who employ me to sort out problems they can't / can't be bothered to sort for themselves. I specialise in fixing weird faults on weird cars (or rather taking the cars to people who I know can fix them, then adding a small "knowledge premium" for myself").

I also know enough people in enough places to mean that if someone comes to me and says "I need this fixing but I'm getting insane quotes to do the job" I will normally know someone who can do the job for much less money and I can get the parts for significantly less than Joe Public is charged. So I get the job done and charge by the hour for my time.

Example, on Friday a friend of mine in the music industry told me that the least he'd been quoted to replace the exhaust on his "W" reg 1.4 Golf was £180. I bought a new exhaust for £57, paid a mate who works in Kwik Fit £20 to fit it and made £20 for myself. Music dude was well happy at saving £80, I made £20 for driving to see my mate at Kwik Fit who I needed to see anyway, Kwik Fit dude was happy with his £20 and he wanted to see me about getting some work done on an Audi A6 TDi V6 which needs its brain interrogating.

This morning I took the A6 to another friend who read the brain for £25, diagnosed the problem and fixed it. I charged Kwik-Fit bloke £50 for sorting the problem, how much he charges is up to him.

I charge £20 an hour for knowing the right people. £30 an hour if I have to get my hands dirty.

I'm also a partner in a motorbike garage and I'm involved with a BSB team, I'm involved with a body repair workshop and I keep a large number of stretch limousines roadworthy for less than the limo specialists charge. The Limo specialists also ring me when they've got a problem, as do the limo spares companies. I also do "call out" jobs for limo companies replacing fan-belts etc, although I do charge £50 an hour if I have to change a limo fan belt at the side of the road + fuel costs.

I work in a recording studio a few nights a week as well, and I'm the road manager for a couple of bands, although I only charge £60 a night if I'm out with a band for a gig.

I'm planning on starting a car import / export business to / from the Czech Republic soon as well, so if any of you lot hear of any cheap LHD cars knocking about, gimme a shout!

I was in internet development, now I'm just a Dole bludger.

I'm looking at moving back into standard office admin at 2/3rds the salary, it's better than the dole putting me onto minimum wage cleaning the bogs on Maccy's.

One piece of advice, avoid going into internet development. And if you think about an IT, prepare to spend a fortune doing vendor based certification rather then university/college based courses, and be prepared to do them first, just to get the job.

Also, if you are any good at building/DIY/Decorating, property development is risky but can be really profitable.

Could that be a problem, though?

Good idea.

This is the $64,00 question, though. What's good to learn now may not be by the time you've finished. Personally, I'd do what you *want* to do and what you enjoy doing. You've a much better chance of doing it well and of finishing the course.

I'm only good at mathematics when I can see a point to it. Differentiation always seemed pointless when I was in the sixth form, it was only when I started looking at graphs, rates of change, blah that it felt useful.

[snip lots of career choices]

Being nursey sounds fun.

I'm nowhere close to being self employed, I take a salary, but I'm not chained to the one desk: my workplace is flexible and I work from a variety of locations. I also with some great people, too, whilst I enjoy the work, it's the people I work with that I enjoy the most. My work involves researching stuff and applying the research to other stuff. It can be as dry or interested to make out as I want. On the one hand I spend lots of time working with databases, spreadsheets, project files and such, to figure out why one should or should not do. On the other hand I'm paid to be entertained in some very nice locations, paid to drive to these places listening to some very interesting, intelligent and articulate people. I'm part of the central resources :-) of the company I work for.

I still don't know what I want to do with my life but I'm not bothered either. When we emigrate to the USA in three to five years, I may do something similar, I may do something different. Natch, not fussed either way, as long as I get to work with decent people.

I work as a self employed Private Hire/Taxi Driver,

I also run scrap most days.

for example heres a typical day from yesterday,

up at 7am out do a couple of hires, stop for brekkie around 8:30 take the first scrap call of the day, arrange to pickup a nissan vannete at

9 Pick up said scabby van (actually a no tax/test 98 model and make the poor man cry by handing him 50 quid. Dump van in the yard. and take a few more hires.

weigh in a couple of scrappers from yesterday and get a paltry 75 quid a ton :( ho hum at least they were cavaliers and vectras. then head out to pick up another scrapper.

in for dinner about 5 before selling the vannete on to my usual outlet at a

300% profit. out do a bit more tooing and froing and call it a day about 7ish.

All in all i work when i need to.

"Pete M" wrote in message news:eq4pue$dbc$ snipped-for-privacy@registered.motzarella.org...

merica - all around half price...

I'm a mangement accountant for a public transport company, which I find quite interesting as I get to deal with all aspects of the business and work with lots of different people. I haven't got any formal accounting qualifications (yet), but what you really need is to be able to think logically in order to work your way through problems, and also be computer literate. I proved I was able to do this and I've worked my way from the bottom of the finance department to my current role.

If you're more of a practical person it's probably not the sort of thing you'd be interested in, but what I think is useful for any job is experience of how a business works and is run, which working in the role I am I've been able to gain over the last few years. So how about some sort of business course? As I said, it's the sort of thing that could be useful in all sorts of jobs, and could be useful if you decide to venture out on your own at some point and set up your own business.

I'd be wary of OU courses though - make sure you find out exactly what they involve. My girlfriend is doing an OU PGCE and the organisation of it is a bit of a shambles! Personally I'd check out what courses you could do during evenings/weekends at your local college.

Also, depending on what sort of engineering course you're thinking about, you'll find they still involved a fair bit of maths. A lot of mates did engineering degrees (civil, aero, automotive and nautical) and some of the calculus they did for that was the same sort of thing I was doing in my degree, which was straight maths!

Yup. I remember the lecturer that took us for the electronics module on my course (Tonmeister at Surrey - Music + Sound Recording in layman's terms) saying that we were the students his department would have preferred (ElecEng), mainly 'cos our maths was so much stronger on the whole than the ElecEng students.

Oi!

I've just gone back to a Cavalier - I've decided for now, the KISS (1) philsophy promoted to all manner of IT related stuff is also the order of the day car wise for a while.

Work wise, I'm an IT contractor - anything from structured programming to advanced deskside support being the order of the day.

Pros: The money isn't bad, and the work is pretty varied. I also look at it as something that offers reasonable career progression to anyone with a bit of savvy and ambition about them.

Cons: When you're contracting, you're always wondering if you'll still be in work another two months down the line unless you're lucky enough to collar a long term rolling contract.

Contracting looks more lucrative on paper, but take into account any time off sick or on holiday etc., and it's not always as rewarding as you'd hope - I had just over a week off due to a bereavement last month, and I soon felt the pinch.

To summarise, I'd say IT was a good thing to get into... but permie positions are where it's at if you want to be loaded in the longer term, at least if you manage to get employed by somewhere prepared to invest plenty of time and money in you - a shit wage today with plenty of decent training and accreditation should lead to a decent career progression tomorrow.

I've previously done plenty of retail, worked as a courier, dabbled in horse trading (2) and spent a fair amount of time bouncing in and out of the pipe organ trade in years gone by, which was more rewarding on a personal level than IT, but ultimately pays f*ck all.

(1) 'Keep It Simple Stupid' (2) The buying and selling of s**te old cars

-- JackH

Well, as another IT contractor who until very recently has been a permie...

I switched from permie to contractor simply because after a good six years of gainful permiedom (after I'd been contracting previously) I couldn't rid myself of the impression that a lot of companies in my field (banking) seem to think that the term "permanent employee" somehow refers to someone who is permanently in the office, day, night and weekends.

You're making a good point about the training - if you're in IT and you're serious about it[1] then you will have to ensure that you're pretty much up to date, even if that means paying for it yourself[2].

Unfortunately all rewarding jobs seem to pay the square root of f*ck all.

[1] And if you aren't could you please be so kind and get out of my project? [2] As I've had to a certain extent even as a permie.

Plasterer, bricky, electrician, plumber etc. owt that's "hands on" and can't be outsourced to india/china IMHO

Can be intrasourced from Poland and other new EU countries though.

Very true, but if you're willing to work there's money to be made. An old mate of mine is a plasterer, he reckons he earns £50k per year from his job and another £40k from "guvvies". Having said that, he's a hard man to track down (I've had to resort to doing my own plastering!) and doesn't get much time of his own, but like he says, another couple of years and his mortgage is paid off.

Tradesmen can do well at the moment IME, Joiners, Painters, Plumbers and Sparkies etc. Careers where you would normally have left school and got a trade but where the school leavers now go to University and Doss.

If you've got a bit of brain you can set up on your own and if you're any good (and even if you're not) you can decide your own hourly rate and end up paying the highest rate of income tax in no time.

I've only had 3 jobs, I'm roughly the same sort of age as you I think (25). I've loved each of my jobs for several reasons: They were great fun, people that mattered knew that I would do what needed to be done without being checked up on and nagged at every 5 minutes and I could have walked out of them as soon as I stopped enjoying them because either the company as a whole didn't care or I didn't care.

Sadly, in my experience you don't get paid very well for doing jobs like that.

I went to Uni for 4 years, but none of the jobs I've had were off the back of my degree.

To be honest mate, if you're parents will support you a bit longer, and you think you could hack it, by all means go and do a proper Uni course, but I personally feel it's not worth it unless you do something traditionally challenging and intellectual and more importantly, you're suited to university education. I think that it suits much, much fewer people than actually end up there. It didn't really suit me, but I've got a sister who now has a PhD and lives and works in the states. University suited her.

OU is different again of course.

Musical people are apparently often quite mathematical as well.

The construction industry's a great place to be at the moment, and probably for a fair while yet. There's good money to be earned, either working your way up not doing any of the physical hard work, or the other, particularly if you set up on your own. Working your way up the office monkey-style ladder of things (i.e. non-manual) tends to be more suited to the type of people who play golf, drink in Yates', listen to not much outside the top 20 and drive a Ford Mondeo, and personally that sort of life has never appealed to me.

Awww, look, Vamp gets his posts replied to in his own language :-)

Aye, that's quite true. My course was also pretty pick in terms of requiring people pretty adept at Maths, Music and Physics. A fair few of them even had personalities and social skills too.

Also, here's a thought I've only just had:

I reckon it's something to do with the fact that we were, on the whole, taught "times tables" up to multiples of 12, and there are 12 semitones in an octave.

Though that could be complete s**te.

There's a lot to do with musical ability that's actually quite closely related to logical/mathematical thinking, though. Like knowing how one chord relates to another, how rhythms fit together, and loads of other stuff too probably.

I'm a university lecturer in marketing. If it's a course you want to do then fine - but pick on that'll get you into a career you're interested in, rather than something generic. I'd suggest having a look at some job roles - if you like the idea ask someone who does that job what it's really like, possibly shadow them even. Then find out what qualifications the job adverts are asking for - and do them.

David

Seconded.

That's true. I used to live next door to a plasterer and he could comfortably only work for half the year and have the rest off. Hard graft for the 6 months he was working though.