IN his career as a hedge fund manager Ed Venables apologised all too often to his wife, Kate, for missing important family occasions.

But the 33-year-old had a very different excuse for disappearing on the day their second child came home from hospital. He had to attend a job interview - to become a teacher.

Venables is one of thousands of City professionals who are taking up other careers because of the destruction wrought by the credit crunch.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has warned that 62,000 financial jobs will be axed in London this year and next. City recruiters say they see a new humbleness in the former “masters of the universe” as they scour the shrinking job market.

Many are using the down-turn - and their redundancy cheques - as an opportunity to set up businesses or chase an alternative career.

They are opting for work ranging from cake-making to plant-selling, from fine art to supplying kitchen equipment in Kenya.

Teaching is one of the most popular choices. Officials from the Training and Development Agency for Schools, which recruits for the state sector, have been staging seminars in the City and Canary Wharf, attracting bankers and accountants to help fill a shortage of maths and science staff.

Venables, however, opted for the private sector and is now giving lessons in economics and business at Wellington college, a public school in Berk-shire that charges fees of £27,000 a year.

“I could see there weren’t going to be any big bonuses paid in the next few years and I’d always wanted to go into teaching,” he said. “If I’d left it another five or 10 years I might never have done it.”

Venables is now responsible for 75 A-level students and is running rugby and scuba-div-ing training after classes. His hours are not much shorter but the chance to go home for lunch helps make the sacrifice worthwhile.

He said: “Now we’re having to think about money a little more. But we made a snowman with the boys yesterday - we wouldn’t have been able to do that in London.”

Nasser Azam, 44, gave up his student dreams of being an artist after parental pressure to get a “proper job” pushed him towards banking. For 23 years, he says, he “didn’t even pick up a pencil or a paintbrush” as he worked his way up to become chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

He left his job in July and is now exhibiting alongside Salva-dor Dali’s work at London’s County Hall and winning commissions across Europe after turning to art full time.

“I lived through the Russian crisis, the Japan crisis, the bursting of the tech bubble,” said Azam. “After these crises, you always go through a period of restructuring. These times, where you are letting people go, are not pleasant. I didn’t want to go through that again.

“The time was right for me to leave - I couldn’t be a serious banker and a serious artist.”

Azam has made enough money never to have to work again, but he is one of the lucky ones.

“There are a lot of people talking to us about transferring their skills to something outside banking, others are talking to us about retraining,” said Phil Sheridan, UK managing director of Robert Half, a recruitment firm.

“It used to be that people came into our office and gave us very clear instructions on what they wanted to do, and how much they were willing to be compensated for that.

“Now we find that quite a lot of previously bullish people are rather humble, with very realistic expectations. Taking time out is a big priority. Where people are looking for a career change it quite often involves an element of doing something for someone else – things such as teaching, or even a career in some form of caring.”

Many of the thousands of foreigners who migrated to Britain to work in the finance industry are now going back home. Some are taking jobs in banks that are still recruiting in Asia and the Middle East.

Others are opting for a change of course. They include Kunal Shah, who was employed by Bear Stearns in London before the American investment bank collapsed.

He had been trading collateralised debt obligations, the notorious mortgage-backed financial instruments blamed for much of the seizing up of the banking system.

“In August 2007, when the crisis began, I could see that those markets were disappearing and moved into credit derivatives, thinking that market looked better,” said Shah. “It wasn’t long before I realised I should just get out of banking.”

Although he was offered a job with JP Morgan, the rival bank that acquired the business, he opted to take redundancy and go home to Kenya in June to run the family business, Nairobi Kitchen Care, which supplies equipment to clients ranging from hotels to refugee camps. He is planning to set up a chain of hardware stores to supply the burgeoning Kenyan building trade.“It feels good to be back,” he said.

Linda Conway, 35, also opted to seize the day. She left her job in equity sales at ABN Amro shortly before the bank became embroiled in an epic takeover battle in early 2007. She sold her flat in Clapham, south London, to provide the seed capital for The Storage Pod, a self-storage business she has set up on the site of the Brooklands racetrack in Surrey.

She said: “I’ve put everything I have into it. In my old job I was selling shares to big pension funds and hedge funds. When I started out raising money for the business, those were the first people I went to. It took me about a year to get the money together.”

Meanwhile, Sarah Hilleary, until August a wealth manager at Merrill Lynch, is setting up a business to supply gourmet wheat-free cakes and biscuits to cafes and market stalls across London. Hilleary, 26, has set aside £20,000 to buy ovens, and is talking to the Wands-worth Youth Enterprise Centre about subsidised office space.

After 14 years in the City Tom Mitchell left Royal Bank of Scotland, where he was head of high yield credit research, to set up a specialist plant nursery, selling rare and exotic species over the internet.

His mind was made up when his wife, an academic, was offered a professorship at the University of Bath. He shifted the garden from his former home in Surrey in seven van-loads before the property was sold. Then he spent about £100,000 on polytunnels, a glasshouse and irrigation system, for his new property.

“I’m just loading up the Land Rover with unique hellebores from the Balkans,” he said “That should give me a base but I’m planning to grow most of the stock from seed.”

Mitchell may have changed career but in his case at least downshifting has not dented his bullishness. “I want to emulate the great Victorian botanists and cultivate plants that have never been introduced to Britain before,” he said.

PROS
- At last! No more 18-hour days. You’ll be able to spend time with the family, perhaps do the school run and amble around the supermarket (see also Cons, below)

- You’ll no longer have to explain to your friends – slowly and repeatedly – what a hedge fund does

- You no longer have to pretend to understand what Robert Peston is talking about

CONS
- No more excuses that you’re staying late at the office. Hello, school run. Hello, Lidl

- You’ll have to sack the nanny, which means she might reveal what you did when your other half was at book club/rugby practice

- You can no longer read about £15,000 watches without flying into a jealous rage

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