Hi lisar

Good advice from Coseca, but if for a moment you delete FMCG from your scope of potential employers, what added value could you offer to an employer in ANY sector? - using the transferable skills, knowledge and experience (SKE - now where I have read those words in legislation?!?!) you have acquired in your life to date. 

Note the word "life" - as some of what you offer may well be from experience OUTSIDE work.

When I joined the HSE it had a policy that any new Inspector was kept well away from the sector in which they had previously been working until all their preconceptions as to acceptable "custom and practice" had been put firmly to bed. We were taught to be curious and entirely unafraid to be ignorant of the processes going on in front of us.

Very soon got into a rhythm....

"What do you know about the sorts of things we do?"

"Nothing (sometimes "not a lot"), please explain your processes, what you see as the risks, and how you manage those risks".

So, a new Inspector would be assigned to an Industry Group - my first one was Textiles, Paper and Printing, Leather and Footwear - and learnt the art.

Every 4 or 5 years (or sooner in the early years) HSE would play musical chairs when it thought its Inspectors might be TOO familiar with any group of industries and perhaps getting a bit stale, so we would be shifted to something new and start again, though of course by this time ready to transfer appropriate lessons already learnt in some sectors in those they were now going to be dealing with.

After more than a decade they let me out to play in large engineering factories. So, on just one occasion:

"I don't suppose you know much about tube bending machines?" - an entirely reasonable assumption!

"Well, actually I am probably the only one of about 650 front line Inspectors who has worked on a hand-operated tube bending machine like the one you have over there."

Possibly the easiest "general inspection" I ever did BUT with no way that I was going to be happy with the standards I had had to work to many years earlier.

With your length of experience you should have come to some conclusions as to measures that are likely to work in a given set of organisational circumstances, AND perhaps more important the measures that are probably doomed to failure, and so your new employer doesn't need to repeat the mistakes of the past!