Nine guides, three ways of working
This section brings together nine guides whose daily reality has little in common. The easiest way to find your bearings is to sort them by how the work is actually done.
- A job inside an organisation: the guide on medical secretarial and executive assistant work, the one on senior manager posts and the one on finance and accounting. You sign a contract, keep set hours and have a line manager.
- An assignment with a defined scope: business consulting, IT expertise and interim management. You step in for one objective, a fixed period and written deliverables, then leave.
- A service you sell yourself: translation and proofreading, moderation and community management and independent legal advice. You find your own clients or commissioning parties, with the invoicing and irregular income that implies.
The boundaries are not watertight: a former chief accountant might cover a year-end close through an agency and later move on to part-time finance director work. But the grouping shows which door to try first, and above all which working life you are choosing before you choose a job title.
Status, hours and rhythm: what really separates the guides
Jobs inside an organisation
Medical secretarial work happens in surgeries, clinics, hospitals and laboratories: welcoming patients, appointments, files, reports, with an almost constant telephone and fairly fixed hours. Executive assistant work is found in companies and associations, with more variable hours tied to a senior person's diary. The guide on senior manager posts compares permanent contracts, fixed-term contracts, interim manager placements and umbrella arrangements, and is the broadest of the three. The guide on finance and accounting leads towards year-end cover, part-time management accounting, procedure reviews or shared-time finance director roles.
Assignments with a defined scope
Consulting produces a diagnosis and recommendations that the client then applies. IT expertise rests on maintenance, migration, technical audit or advanced support, sometimes with on-call duty. Interim management hands you real delegated authority for a few months, paid at a daily rate, with no guaranteed number of days a year. All three share one reality: gaps between contracts that you must manage yourself.
Services you sell yourself
Translation and proofreading are mostly done at home, with deadlines from one day to several weeks and a rate per word, page or hour. Moderation can be a team job with quotas, including evenings and nights, or the running of a voluntary-sector forum for a few hours a day. Independent legal advice is the most tightly regulated: part of the activity is reserved for regulated professions, which sharply narrows what a free-standing service can include.
Neighbouring guides: which one for which need
Several guides sound alike in their titles but differ in content. Telling them apart saves you from reading the wrong one.
- Consulting or interim management: a consultant analyses and recommends; an interim manager decides, signs, leads teams and answers for results. The first can start small with a light legal status; the second assumes you have already held a leadership post.
- Interim executive cover or interim management: interim executive cover replaces an absence or reinforces a team, whereas interim management answers an urgent, targeted need such as a reorganisation or a crisis.
- Accountant in post or shared-time finance director: the first slots into an existing team; the second means working alone across several organisations a few days a month.
- Proofreading or revising a translation: proofreading corrects the language of a text; revising compares it with the original to check meaning, terminology and completeness. The second job takes longer and is priced separately.
- Moderating or community managing: a moderator applies a charter to content; a community manager hosts, replies and keeps the relationship alive, with more editorial initiative.
- Medical secretary or executive assistant: the same rigour, but health vocabulary and discretion about patients on one side, budgets, committees and travel on the other.
When the right to practise or confidentiality decides
In several guides, what you are allowed to do matters as much as what you know how to do.
Legal advice, a regulated activity
Twenty or thirty years in a legal department do not amount to authorisation. In France, giving paid legal consultations to third parties and drafting legal documents for them is in principle reserved for regulated professions. The guide separates what stays open: general training, document research, review of internal procedures, non-legal organisational advice, and mediation after proper training. The line often runs through the word consultation and through a written opinion on one client's particular situation.
Banking, insurance and certified translation
The same logic applies elsewhere. In banking and insurance, some advisory or sales roles require training or registration, while internal control, staff training and compliance are easier to enter. In translation, a certified or sworn version is reserved for people on official expert lists; without that standing, it is better to refer the requester onwards.
Health and sensitive content
A medical secretary gives no clinical opinion and follows the practitioner's written instructions. A moderator should ask which content will be reviewed, what breaks are built in and what psychological support exists: a voluntary-sector forum and a queue of videos expose you to very different images.
Where to enter: networks, firms, agencies, platforms
Each guide has its dominant channel, and mixing them up costs months.
- Consulting and IT expertise: your network first, with a short introduction sent to twenty targeted contacts and an offer of a thirty-minute conversation; then freelance platforms and IT services firms.
- Interim management: specialist firms, with multi-stage selection and checked references. Registration promises no assignment, so approach several.
- Finance and manager posts: recruitment and temporary-staffing agencies, finance directors' associations, former colleagues and accountants in practice.
- Secretarial work: healthcare agencies and hospital recruitment sites for the medical side; recruitment firms and temping for executive support.
- Translation: agencies that distribute jobs, companies in your former sector, professional associations and matching platforms, with several months of prospecting to expect.
- Moderation: contractors working for large platforms, small organisations and charities; a moderation test sometimes comes before the interview.
In every case the client company pays the intermediary, never the candidate.
Which guide for which background
You have led a team or a site
Interim management, manager posts and consulting are your closest fits. The first suits someone who can decide quickly, leave after a handover and live on assignments of a few months; the second someone who prefers a lasting post or interim executive cover; the third someone who wants to pass on knowledge without holding line authority.
You have technical or financial expertise
IT rewards knowledge of an ageing system, migration and documentation. Finance looks for year-end cover and part-time management accounting. Former lawyers will find in the legal guide routes into salaried posts, training or research support rather than free consultation.
You like organising and dealing with people
Medical secretarial work suits someone who can handle the telephone and a sometimes anxious public; executive assistant work suits someone who enjoys keeping a senior person's diary and saying no politely.
You prefer writing and working from home
Translation and proofreading reward flawless writing in the target language and a field you know, for instance logistics or finance. Moderating a voluntary-sector forum calls for patience and a sense of proportion, without the exposure of a mass queue of content.
Real time, income and pensions: what people forget
In the self-employed guides, billable time is only part of the day: prospecting, preparation, drafting, travel and keeping tools up to date take a large share. Anyone who wants a lighter working life but does not plan for this soon ends up with a load close to the old one. Income depends too much on specialism, region and clientele to be quoted: no guide gives figures and no platform guarantees a volume of work.
Status also changes your protection. An employment contract gives a simple framework. A sole-trader set-up is quick to create but puts all the administration on you. An umbrella or portage arrangement leaves you free to find assignments while a company invoices and pays you a salary after its fees. For a management mandate, a personal company is common, with professional insurance and cover for illness to arrange yourself.
The single pension point for this section: before signing anything, ask each of your schemes in writing how the planned activity will be treated, because combining pay and pension varies by scheme, retirement date and type of work, and a reform has been announced in France for those retiring from 2027.
Testing before you commit: three steps
- Pick two guides with different logic, for example a secretarial post and a proofreading service, and note for each the status, tools, intended clients and time needed to get going.
- Test on a small scale: a day of immersion or a short contract for a post; three anonymised cases and a first written quote for an assignment; a proofread sample or a moderation test for a service.
- Review the time you really spent, how tired you were and what you learned, then keep one main route and a second in reserve.
Three pitfalls recur from one guide to the next: accepting an assignment with no written deliverable or scope, paying up front for training or for access presented as a passport, and claiming a qualification you do not hold, especially in law or health. Relying on a single client also weakens every self-employed activity in this family.