Quit My £100k Car Sales Job for Happiness

A New Path: From Corporate to Sustainability

Standing over the kitchen sink and rinsing out pots of yoghurt was one of the many mundane tasks Alice Rackley did repeatedly during her second maternity leave in 2020. Yet it made her start rethinking her career. She had climbed the ranks at Marks & Spencer, becoming its head of customer experience.

“I thought, ‘Do I really want to go back to a role that’s about selling as much stuff as possible – when actually I wasn’t really comfortable with how this stuff was being handled or dealt with at the end of its life,” Rackley, 43, recalls.

“Would I actually prefer to try and do something about the stuff, and where it ends up?”

The stars all seemed to align. Rackley was able to take redundancy at M&S, freeing her to pursue a new career with a focus on sustainability and the environment.

In 2021, she met the co-founders of Polytag, a company which helps retailers track how much of their packaging actually ends up being recycled. She was appointed CEO in July that year. Working with big brands like Aldi, Co-op and Ocado, she’s excited about helping reduce plastic waste in the UK.

“By Christmas, we’ll be in 15 of the UK’s largest recycling centres, and brands that have put tags on their packaging are seeing proof of their packaging being recycled,” she says.

“I feel like I’m about to realise my dream of five years ago, when I was thinking, ‘what happens to these yogurt pots now?’”

Salary vs Sustainability

But Rackley’s dream has come at a cost. A 30 per cent drop in salary from what she was making at M&S, to be exact – along with the subsequent corporate pay rises she has since missed out on, which she estimates would be double to triple her current salary.

Rackley is part of the “passion pay gap”, and the 48 per cent of environmental professionals in the UK who say their pay doesn’t reflect their level of experience or possibility. That’s according to a survey conducted by the Environmental Services & Solutions Expo, Groundwork and the Environmental Services Association.

Yet she says she was committed to her new career path regardless of the money. It also helped that she and her family had already moved from London to north Wales in 2019. They’ve reduced their living expenses, and settled into their dream five bedroom, sea-view house after selling their much smaller city flat.

“I’ve stayed in touch with people from my consulting days, and I have no doubt they are earning loads of money. But we’re making an impact in our own small sector,” says Rackley.

“You can’t solve it all. But we’ve picked our niche, and we are trying to do our bit, and that is worth a lot to me.”

A Shift in Purpose

“I was selling expensive cars to the rich – I wanted to have a greater impact”

In parallel, Rebecca Day’s financial situation has taken a hit in the past year. She’s been running her two businesses she set up in 2019 and 2023: Still Curious, a marketing and events agency for green energy and social impact companies, and She’s Electric, an initiative to engage more women in the electric vehicle industry.

Last year, Day, 44, was paid just £26,000 – a long way off the six figure salary she had been earning in 2016 in her consultancy work with Aston Martin, which involved trips to Monaco.

“At Aston Martin, my purpose in life became selling incredibly expensive cars to incredibly rich people. Was that going to be what was in my obituary? That just wasn’t enough. I felt like I had more to give, and I could take my talents somewhere else that was going to have a greater impact,” she says.

Leaving London has been essential to maintain a good quality of life for her six-year-old son. Day moved to Gloucestershire in 2022 with her mother, selling her London flat to get a mortgage on a four-bedroom house. Day’s mum contributes to the bills, and buys the groceries. They have also taken on a lodger.

“It is a bit of a scrabble,” says Day. “I can’t just take my son off to an all-inclusive resort for a couple of weeks.

“But I get to spend the rest of my time as a much happier, fulfilled person, and I’m probably a better mum, because I’m not coming home every day, going, ‘what on earth was that?’”

Navigating the Transition to a Green Career

Those questioning their career choices – but wondering how they’ll make ends meet – shouldn’t give up hope. Day’s marketing business did earn over £1m in its first year, and she was able to pay herself a decent salary.

But the death of her She’s Electric co-founder, Gemma Huddleston, last year meant Day had to make drastic financial changes, and take the hit personally to keep things afloat.

How to Change Careers to a ‘Green’ Job

While 71 percent of people say they want to move into a “green” job, according to a survey of 1,000 Brits by green energy experts 100Green, it isn’t just salaries that’s an issue – 40 percent say there is a lack of jobs in the sector.

Climate-focused careers coach Hannah Wickes confirms that while there aren’t as many jobs in this space as there used to be, there are opportunities. Wickes collates these via her Opportunity Seeker newsletter, but she also recommends Countryside Job Service, Routes to Work, Terra.do and Escape the City.

It’s a broad field, from roles in technical companies like Polytag or renewable energy, to sustainability roles within corporates, to on the-ground conservation work. Wickes recommends doing plenty of research to understand where your skills would be transferable, or where you’d need to reskill.

“There are some roles where you’ll need to go back and study, or you’d need to start in a kind of graduate role and learn your way,” says Scotland-based Wickes, 37.

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She also recommends volunteering with an organisation that focuses on an area you’re interested in.

“People underestimate how beneficial volunteering can be in a career transition like this, as it can help build up your CV and show that you’ve had this interest for more than a day,” she says.

“It also helps build up your network to give you the references that you might need. Over time, that can really shift whether or not you’re going to be able to get into this sector.”

Wickes herself is proof that you don’t always need to sacrifice your salary while pursuing sustainability and satisfaction. In 2018, she managed to make the move from travel website Trivago to climate positive search engine Ecosia – earning both a promotion and a pay rise.

She had experience in reaching large audiences through her journalism background, and her time at Trivago had made her marketing and budget savvy. She had also volunteered with the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).

“That was quite a unique combination and interesting to them because they had limited budgets,” says Wickes.

“That experience with the RSPB really helped show that my interest in the space was genuine.”

At Polytag, where the whole team is paid less than what they could earn in the corporate world, Rackley hopes the business will become profitable soon so she can give everyone pay rises.

“It’s a long journey, and if you want the business to be financially healthy, you can’t take all the capital out of it in the early days to pay people what they need,” she says.

“If you enjoy the job, you love the people you work with, and you feel you’re making an impact, to some extent, that’s compensation for the more material changes that you have to accept by taking a lower salary.”