I am currently in a contract role that ends in a few months and am looking for work, as part of that search I decided to explore a couple of facilities management roles. I have interviewed for two and been offered one but I am not entirely sure it is for me. My passion lies in health and safety and I am first of all worried that working in a role that only slightly touches on elements of health and safety will disrupt my long term career plans and secondly concerned that I will just get bored as I am not really interested and just taking it to get myself out of a hole. I feel like I wanted to explore it to open up my opportunities but I have come to a bit of a dead end with it and I should leave it alone now and focus on my passion, my health and safety career. Will it hurt my long term career plans to step sideways for a while? my thinking was that it may help but I can't help but feel like I just don't want to do this I want to stick to what I love doing and that is health and safety not facilities management. I twill potentially drive me a little bit crazy working under someone else's health and safety rules especially if they are not particularly competent. I don't know what to do.

Hi It seems to me that if your work contract is running out and you have been offered another position even if you consider it to be in another sector; take it. No sense in being out of work until you manage to obtain the job you really want. (Unless you've got loads of money stashed away - because as we all know all us health and safety people are paid stupendous amounts of money - topic for another forum item there no doubt !!!!!) This is my opinion for whats its worth. I have been a health and safety manager for a long time, and a couple of years ago I decided to look for a better position, but still in a health and safety capacity. I applied for a job with the title "health,safety and facilities manager" I got the job but was unsure how the two roles would fit together. And I can honestly say they complement each other perfectly. A facilities manager needs a good working knowledge of health and safety or he cant fulfill his duties competently. You never know how your new role will progress until you've tried. If its not what you envisioned, at least you will be employed whilst you have a look around for the role you feel would suit you better. Good luck