Get the low-down on different careers in the world of business: recruitment consultant, business development adviser, corporate finance manager, marketing executive and junior accountant.

My name is Shabir Ahmed. I work for Cray Crow Engineering as a recruitment consultant. My job involves a variety of tasks. One of those roles is to assess candidates' CVs, and another one is to go on sales visits to identify our company brand with the organisations. Also I have to interview a lot of candidates and I have to be on the phone a lot of the time as well, selling our service to our new clients as well as existing clients, and make sure our candidates are what the client is after. My educational background is, I've got nine GCSEs, four A levels and I've got a BA honours in financial services. The interpersonal skills you actually learn at school in talking to your classmates and your teachers are very relevant to my position at the moment in helping me develop my relationship with my clients my candidates.

There are a variety of things I enjoy about my job, one day is not the same to the next. Every day is different. I get to meet a wide variety of people, whether it's candidates or clients. Also I get to earn loads of money, it's not just a fixed salary. However hard you work you get paid. I just work within a good environment.

My name is Melany Watts. I work at Rotherham Chamber and I'm a business development adviser. The Rotherham Chamber of Commerce is a business support organisation, and my role is to go out and talk to businesses to discuss bespoke training packages. Another part of my role is networking, which involves introducing businesses to other businesses so that they can inter-trade.

After completing GCSEs I did my A levels. I decided then that university wasn't the right option for me so I took a job as an office junior and did a part-time college course, and I basically worked my up from there. I think the people who do well as an office junior are those who have a ‘can do' attitude, and are willing to pick up the gauntlet and actually get on with the tasks that are asked of them and show enthusiasm. In my current role English skills are essential, you need to be a good communicator, as well as maths. You need to be able to do sales proposals. Again your IT skills are an invaluable part of the job. I can't do my job without IT skills.

Well NVQs are great for people who do want to start work straight away, because it gives you the training but it also enables you to earn money, which was really important to me.

My name if Paul Fawcett and I'm a corporate finance manager with Fawcett Chartered Accountants. I'm involved in corporate finance, which is all to do with transactions, usually to do with what is called mergers and acquisitions, which is buying a company, selling a company or raising the finance to buy a company.

I enrolled on a graduate programme [of training] with a major bank which enabled me to see a variety of different financial roles. I've worked in Sheffield and London and in New York. There are two ways into the field that I'm in really. Firstly, you could go through a major investment bank in places such as London, New York, Tokyo, but you'd have to specialise in a certain field. To do corporate finance in the regions of the UK, the best way is probably through an accountancy route, but as my background has shown, that's not essential.

I'm Caroline Wigley, I'm a marketing executive and I work for a firm of specialist business advisers and chartered accountants called Viner Taylor. I haven't had any formal training. I left school with eight GCSEs, and because I didn't know what I wanted to do I went to college to do a secretarial course, and I sort of fell into marketing by accident and decided that I enjoyed it, so I did a proper marketing qualification and worked my way up, basically.

Well every company needs a marketing department to get the message across about what the company does and the services it offers or the products it makes, because if you don't market them, nobody knows about them. You have to get the right activities to get the messages across and make sure people are aware of you. If you're interested in marketing, the best thing to do is just look around you at all the different marketing messages that are there, such as the adverts on TV, adverts in the papers and magazines. Just look at the adverts on TV when you see them and just try and analyse them. Try to see the messages that are there and how it's coming across to you.

My name is Dan Shean and I work for Allotts Chartered Accountants as a junior accountant. As junior accountant I am involved in preparing accounts for the clients as well as going out on audits, and studying for my exams. I got 10 GCSEs including maths and science and then I went on to do A levels, which were in science subjects. Then I went on to do a business studies degree, then after that I went travelling for a year and then started my job here at Allotts. To do my job I think it's important to have good maths skills, to be good at problem solving, and to have good IT skills as well. There are good prospects in chartered accountancy. Obviously, it's a lot hard work at the beginning with the studying and learning how you actually go about things, but once you get chartered, there's a lot possibilities either in practice or in business.

Melany Watts
In business, the skills that you learn are really transferable. It doesn't matter which industry you go into, everybody needs a salesperson, a receptionist, an administrator. So the skills that you learn are transferable wherever you go.