Employment in high street banks.

I don't think there's much call in banks for intelligent people these days.

Move to Swansea or Cardiff - the banks have set up incredibly low paying jobs and take on loads of 'intelligent' people. Mind you, they have started to off-shore to Bangalore. Banking is a disappearing 'profession' in this country but many older people have not worked this out yet.

I suspect you are thinking of a past era. These days I think it likely that the vast majority of those 'behind the scenes' people* are to be found in HQ and not at the branch. For example, try calling your local bank branch, you'll almost certainly get routed through to a call centre (clue is in the word "centre")where your query will be dealt with. For my bank, Barclays, its practically impossible to even get a branch phone number. My advice would be to encourage your friends to get his son some training in people skills. Whatever you do, you need people skills, even if you are a self employed person who works alone you still need to sell your product/service.

If he wants to go into IT, chances are he'll still need to speak to business users to transate their requirements into an application, or just to sell himself to the manager to get a raise.

Move to Scotland.

NatWest had an operations centre in London that employed about 100 shift workers earning 30-40k per year. RBS took them over and they were all made redundant. Needless to say the prospect of moving from London to Scotland did not appeal to many.

Matthew I have to agree with Ronald, not a lot of call for intelligent people in banks these days I left BB 2 1/2 years ago and have doubled my salary in that time. Unless your friends son is a high flyinging graduate (I was only a Daedalus level) I wouldn't recommend it. banking and in fact most other service industries are not geographically bound and so without people skills in that industry he could find himself made redundant overnight.

HTH Jason

I see your points and thanks for them.

It seems to me that either one has to be a graduate and do some kind of training scheme (all of which don't start until September 2005) or do the customer services work, like at the tills.

Oh well, thanks anyhow. Feel free to post any further ideas!

It can depend on who you know.

My friend's dad was a manager and it was no problem to get a temp job in the holidays - but times may well have changed since then. :)

In message , Dave

Eh? Why not? The equity in your houses would have bought you castles? & Edinburgh is beautiful.

In message , Ronald Raygun writes

Ahh! So you HAVE been listening all the time!

In message , Doug Ramage writes

Sadly yes. There isnt a 'manager' to know any more. And those temporary 'summer' jobs are now available all the time! Start at 9.00 on Monday, then 'Head of Glass Protected Defences' by 9.15.

In a local branch of a well known bank I saw a 'newby' progress to 'customer service manager' in weeks, despite telling me that it was 'illegal' for me to pay a cheque crossed 'account payee only' into an account other than the named payee........

but very cold compared to London. Rab C Nesbit was also rather scary.

"john boyle" wrote

How many other "customer service managers" were there at the same branch?! [I suspect many?]

In message , Tim writes

No, just the one, but the was a Customer Quality Manager, a Customer Sales Manager, Customer Assurance manager, etc., etc,. But nobody actually doing any work.......