‘I left my $200k a year job to become a cleaner’: Why people quit office work | Carmen Forward
Tony Beaumont was earning more than $200,000 as the NSW marketing manager for BP. He had 45 staff reporting to him, access to a company car, regularly flew for work and even had shares in the oil company.Tony Beaumont was an oil company executive until he quit his white collar job to become a cleaner.Now operating Jim’s Cleaning Bayview, he said he would “do the same thing again without a shadow of a doubt.
“I wanted to be my own boss. I didn’t want to manage others anymore. I had had 10 direct and thirty-five indirect people reporting to me. I didn’t want any staff that I had to worry about.” He was a highly-educated scientist who realised before the pandemic hit that white-collar employment did not necessarily mean higher job satisfaction or even extra income.
“In the lab, it wasn’t physically hard, but you are constantly thinking 10 to 15 times more. Genetics is a very, very complicated field. Anyone can pick up a brush and paint and fill some gaps. Just not anybody can go in the lab and do genetics. It is a specialised field. I loved it, but unfortunately, the money is not there,” he said.“Money has the final say. Researchers in areas immediately get affected depending on the grants.