job training

9 Careers You Don't Need a Ton of Experience to Start

Paul Michael — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 10:00:09 +0000

So, you don't have a lot of experience, but you don't want to settle for a terrible job. What are your options? Well, you may be surprised to learn that there are careers out there offering decent salaries that don't even require a high school diploma, let alone a degree. And since the cost of college these days is so high, continuing education may not even be an option for you. If you're looking for a career that doesn't need any real experience to start, here are nine options worth considering.

1. Private Investigator

You'll see private investigators popping up in movies and TV shows all the time, and they seem to live the lifestyle of an action hero crossed with Sherlock Holmes. In reality, a P.I. does not spend his or her time jumping off buildings, embroiled in car chases, and saving the day. Instead, the job involves a lot of research and background checking, and 80% of the work will be done in front of a computer and on the phone. Cases usually revolve around personal disputes, legal issues, or financial troubles — although sometimes a P.I. will be brought in to help look for a missing person, deliver a subpoena, or track down a relative. Although a background in either law enforcement of the military is the usual path of getting into the business, all you really need is a skill for uncovering information and, in some states, a P.I. license.

Average Annual Salary: $45,610

2. Real Estate Broker

With good people skills and the ability to convince someone to buy something, you could do well in real estate. To get started, you will need to get a license to become an agent, and that requires you to take a 60-hour course. Once you have that, you can either go out on your own, or get a job with a local real estate firm. And after you've tucked a little experience under your belt (usually 1-3 years), you can take another test to become a broker. Then, you can build a network of clients and referrals, and start making some serious money. Although the median salary is just over $70k, top real estate brokers can earn well over $300k per year.

Average Annual Salary: $72,500

3. Delivery Driver

If you have a license to drive an automobile, you can become a delivery driver. You do not need a Commercial Driver's License unless the job you're applying for states it specifically. Delivery driver jobs can range from part-time work at the local pizza place, to handling dangerous substances (known as Hazmat). Once upon a time, you needed a good working knowledge of the local, or sometimes national, roads and highways, but smartphones with built-in GPS and map apps have changed all that. The hours can be long, and not always 9-5, but if you're looking for a job with no experience, this is a good bet.

Average Annual Salary: $38,326

4. Deckhand

If you like the ocean and want to do some free traveling, a deckhand could be just the job you're looking for. The deckhands on a cruise ship don't get to do a lot of fun work, but they do get to see a little of the world as part of the job. Duties include monitoring gangways, running ship drills, mopping, sweeping, cleaning, making minor repairs, painting, helping to dock the boat, solving small problems, and basically being a jack-of-all-trades. Deckhands are also needed on dredges, riverboats, fishing vessels, and scows. No experience is needed to start this job, and contracts are usually for six months or longer. After you gain some experience on the ship, you can move up to deck officer, mate, or even captain.

Average Annual Salary: $38,000

5. Police Officer

"To protect and to serve." It's the motto of many police departments, and if you have what it takes to do it, you could make a fine police officer. All you need is a high school diploma, and to be in good physical shape. Police expert Neal C. Griffin says that great officers exhibit the Five I's: integrity, intellect, industry, initiative, and impact. Therefore, you should also exhibit excellent moral character, have a knack for solving problems, and work well under duress. If this sounds like something you are interested in, you will need to submit an application, complete a written test (called a civil service exam), and take a physical fitness test. After that, you'll undergo a background check before being accepted to an academy for training. This takes six months, after which you'll do 3-6 months of field training.

Average Annual Salary: $48,815

6. Oil Field Worker

When asked about the experience needed in an interview for JobShdaow.com, the "roughneck" replied, "You don't even have to have a GED to do this job. In fact a lot of the industry never finished high school, or middle school. There is no educational boundaries for drilling. All you need is a strong back and a lot of common sense."

This 22-year-old who was interviewed is already making over $100K a year, but does warn that it is hard, sometimes backbreaking work, and the 84-hour workweek can be grueling (you work two weeks on, two weeks off). If you can take direction well, don't mind getting your hands dirty, and can manage the schedule, you'll do well in this business, and make a lot of money. Of course, it can also be dangerous work; in 2012, 138 workers died on the job, with the fatality rate eight times higher than the all-industry rate of 3.2 deaths per 100,000 workers.

Average Annual Salary: $69,000

7. Administrative Assistant

Although many companies will look for at least a high school diploma on your resume, there is no experience required to be an administrative assistant. You should have good typing and organization skills, and familiarity with some of the most common software programs (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Admin assistants are usually tasked with filing, making and receiving calls, managing visitors, typing letters, organizing business meetings, and doing other odd jobs around the office. If you excel in the position, you can quickly rise to senior administrative assistant, executive assistant, and even senior executive assistant. The higher up the ladder you go, the greater the perks and the pay. You may get to do a lot of traveling, and attend some pretty fancy industry events, too.

Average Annual Salary: $37,006

8. Security Guard

Don't think that all security guards are strapping six-foot bodybuilders with former military experience. While some positions do require someone with good physical fitness and self-defense training, many are simply asked to report suspicious activity. In fact, many retirees go into security work, and they are in their sixties and seventies.

Duties can include sitting in a room watching CCTV monitors, crowd control, and doing regular patrols of the building. It's possible you will have to confront people, but that will be outlined in the job description. If you're young and fit, you could easily get promoted to head up a team of guards, and may eventually get a job at the head office.

Average Annual Salary: $29,083

9. Car Sales Consultant

No experience is needed to sell automobiles, but how much you earn in a year will vary greatly depending on the kind of salesperson you are. Now, the profession gets a bad rap, but the industry has definitely cleaned up its image over the last decade. And with the Internet helping people do a lot more research, sales consultants are much less likely to force bad deals and excessive pricing on customers. Instead, the job is more about selling the great features and benefits of the car, and closing the sale. Interestingly enough, only 20% of a dealership's revenue comes from new car sales; the majority comes from buying and selling used cars for a profit, servicing cars, and financing. Selling cars can be hard work, especially during the weekdays when few people come onto the lots. But if you're good at it, you can easily make over $300K a year selling higher-end cars like BMWs and Audis.

Average Annual Salary: $31,000 + Commission

Salary information found on Indeed, Payscale, and Glassdoor.

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This article is from Paul Michael of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

How to Make a Major Career Switch Without Going Back to School

Julie Rains — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:24:33 +0000

Recurring layoffs at your workplace, unwelcome developments in your chosen profession, or other life events may prompt career-oriented soul searching. A natural response is to return to school for retraining in order to launch a second career.

But you don't have to go back to school in order to make a major career change. I have worked with people who have altered the course of their careers without the benefit of an extra degree or even specialized training. They were able to trade their experiences, knowledge, and expertise in one field for an equal or better position in another area. Here are some techniques that worked for them. (See also: 25 Career Changes You Can Make Today)

Never Tell a Potential Employer That You Are Changing Careers

When you realize that your education, experience, and expertise is in a dying field or one that no longer holds your interest, your instincts may direct you to tell a potential employer that you want to change careers.

What you may be trying to convey is you realize opportunities in your current field are limited or non-existent in a variety of ways. What the employer hears is that you have little to offer except for a willingness to try something new at someone else’s expense.

This same employer, however, may welcome your aspirations if they are presented in a different way. Instead of focusing on what you expect to gain, you should highlight what you have to offer.

Learn about potential employers and their opportunities through research and informational interviews. Using this inside knowledge, describe how your professional approach is an excellent cultural fit for the company and how your capabilities match specific accountabilities of job openings.

Use the Skills You Already Have

To land a job in an unrelated field, use the skills you have now. But don’t recite them verbatim from your current job description. Instead, think deeply about what you really do and how you accomplish objectives.

For example, if you are in charge of month-end and year-end statements, don’t just talk about processing debits and credits, handling account reconciliations, and publishing financial reports. Instead, explain how you develop and nurture relationships with departmental managers on whom you rely to get information on a timely basis. Talk about the visual timelines you created to promote schedule compliance. Share how you trained your direct reports to serve as financial guides to peers in field operations.

A hiring manager may not need an accountant. But she may need someone who can manage relationships, design work processes that relate financial data to operations, or develop people to interact effectively with those in other professional disciplines.

Reframe Your Resume

Resumes are often designed and written to appeal to a hiring manager in a candidate’s current field or industry. They are filled with industry lingo and corporate buzzwords, reference accomplishments that don’t make sense to outsiders, and contain attempts to highlight generalized capabilities, such as communication and leadership skills.

To transition to a new career, you’ll need to think about your past differently. When writing the resume, discuss accountabilities and accomplishments in a way that doesn’t assume specialized knowledge on the part of the reader. Explain the context for those unfamiliar with the inner workings of your field or industry. Present accomplishments, but also provide insight into your thought processes and actions that generated results.

Hiring managers want to know what you’ve done in the past, but they also need to know how your work will benefit them in the future. The right kind of reframing reveals both. (For guidance in portraying your past in honest yet illuminating ways, see these examples of showcasing transferable skills and experiences.)

Leverage Industry Knowledge

Your knowledge may be valuable to companies that seem to operate in completely different fields than your own. Such businesses may serve an industry in a way that is not apparent to the casual observer or have plans to reach a new market segment.

For example, a consumer products manufacturer may want to embed its products in the construction industry supply chain. Its current slate of employees, though, are experts in retail merchandising. They know little about capturing sales from companies engaged in construction. Your knowledge of a seemingly unrelated industry may be a boon to this potential employer.

Don't dismiss your industry know-how as irrelevant to outsiders. Learn about an organization's plans first. Then, identify and articulate how your expertise could be instrumental in helping the business reach its goals.

Apply at Fast-Growing Companies

Fast-growing companies often have difficulty attracting and keeping a full roster of capable employees. While some of these organizations may need people with narrowly defined, highly technical skills, many are simply looking for smart, motivated people.

These employers are often more apt to hire someone who is comfortable with ever-evolving responsibilities, frequently changing organizational structures, and increasingly competitive environments, despite lack of experience in a particular field. If you enjoy change and challenges, then search for opportunities with growing organizations.

Enter a Management Training Program

Getting educated by a new employer in a management training program is similar to going back to school. However, in this scenario, you’ll get paid while learning, plus have a job when the program ends.

Even mid-careerists may find that a training program can launch them successfully into a new career. Sure, trainee pay may be lower than you’d like. But program graduates with significant real world experience are attractive to hiring managers within the company.

In the right environment, you may be able to land a position that offers fast upward mobility. The combination of your newly acquired knowledge and longstanding workplace wisdom should enable you to deliver strong performance that will get you noticed and moved quickly to the next level.

Leverage Your Contacts

Your professional network and industry contacts may help connect you to a new career.

Now, I am not suggesting that you beg friends to recommend you for a job that’s out of your league, reach out to acquaintances to generate sales for a business startup, or ask colleagues to end long-term relationships to begin doing business with the new firm you’ve joined. But I am saying that specific relationships may allow you to bring value to a company in a different field than your current one.

For example, if your clients have the need for certain goods or services outside of your field, then a potential employer that distributes these solutions may bring you on board to connect with them. Similarly, contacts in a hard-to-reach demographic, such as high-income professionals or busy institutional administrators, can give you an edge if a prospective employer wants to market to them or those like them.

Find Companies That Hire People With Backgrounds Similar to Yours

Managers often use a gut feel when making hiring decisions. Consciously or not, they notice a link between successful hires and employment candidates with particular backgrounds (such as experience with a certain company, a degree from a specific college or university). As a result, they favor candidates who have qualifications seemingly unrelated to the job description or industry at hand.

Keep up with the career paths of your former classmates and colleagues. Detect hiring patterns, note the companies that seem to have an interest in people with backgrounds similar to yours, and determine what the hiring organizations found attractive about your connections. Apply for positions with these companies or similar ones.

Learn as Much as You Can

Just because you don’t have to go back to school to change careers doesn’t mean that you don’t have to learn anything new. Your professional experience, industry knowledge, and educational credentials may land you a job in a new field, but you can’t count on your past alone to propel you to a successful future. Applying expertise in a new professional discipline or industry requires effort and creativity. To learn on the job and thrive in your new position, take these steps:

Arrange meetings with colleagues to learn about the company and its functional groups.
Develop resources for domain knowledge, market insights, and tips for navigating the organization (and offer yourself as a resource to others).
Enroll in classes offered and/or paid for by your employer.
Take opportunities to visit clients and field operations.
Go to professional events, both locally and nationally, to get up to speed on industry norms and trends.

Many people are surprised at how the skills they have honed in one setting are applicable to new environments. They often enjoy great success because the change has afforded them newfound perspective.

Have you changed careers without going back to school? Tell us how you landed a new job and made this transition.

This article is from Julie Rains of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: