Emma Dandy, a former cheese company owner was among 35 new St. James's Place Academy graduates recently announced, as she becomes a wealth manager.

Ms Dandy, who spent five years running her La Cremerie in Hertfordshire and has appeared on BBC One's Spring Kitchen with Tom Kerridge, completed the two-year training programme.

Ms Dandy, who has been a judge at the World Cheese Awards and Great Taste Awards, is also a former financial journalist.

Here she explains her unusual journey from journalism to a cheese firm to wealth management.

It’s been two and a half years since I took the plunge and applied to the St James’s Place Academy, run by St. James’s Place Wealth Management, in a bid to start a new career as a financial adviser, writes Emma Dandy, associate partner at St. James’s Place Wealth Management.

I’m delighted to say that despite the gruelling interview process, the exams and the hard work involved, I have come out the other side, graduated from the Academy and I am now running my own financial planning business.

I’ve had a varied career with a break when my children were young, and I was concerned that might work against me in my bid to join the Academy.

However, what seemed to matter more were the skills I had built up in my previous jobs and how these could help me become a successful financial adviser. In particular, an ability to talk to all types of people and find out about them – key journalistic skills too.

At school in the 1980’s the careers department was stuck in a rut and suggesting we should have one career for life and told me it was vital to decide on a profession in my teens and see it through to retirement.

That never really appealed to me and I’m delighted that society and the world of work has moved on and developed in the last few decades.

I’ve always been interested in finance – my grandfather was a bank manager and early on he talked to me about the differences between saving and investment. I’m always grateful for that early bit of advice and it got me interested in companies, shares and investing in general.

My first job after university was for a financial newswire, writing about companies and share prices, interviewing CEOs, and I quickly moved to the Investors Chronicle magazine and then onto newspapers – my last job as a journalist was City & Business News Editor at The Independent. The job was fantastic, exciting and high pressure.

I then, quite unplanned, took a career break to bring up my children while they were young. I knew this was a risk career-wise, but I also believed that it would not be fatal.

When my youngest was 2 years’ old I felt the time was right to find a way back into the world of work. I didn’t want to be a newspaper journalist again and I didn’t want to be an employee. So I decided to see if I could set up a business for myself.

I have a passion for cheese, and when I lived in London there were amazing cheese shops I could go to. But I had moved out of London a few years earlier and couldn’t get the quality that I wanted. So, I saw a business opportunity. I set up and ran an online cheese retail company, picked up an award and did a bit of TV. All fantastic fun, but it’s very hard to run a food business on a small scale with all the regulations.

I came to the point where I could see that businesses offering services rather than products were more viable long term. I’d been networking with my cheese business and had met a few financial advisers and I thought – “I could do that”.

So, I looked online to find out how to become a financial adviser, and came across the website for the St. James’s Place Academy. I knew the company and its first class reputation from my time as a journalist. The more I read about the Academy, the more it appealed to me.

I’m delighted they accepted me onto the programme, and I was really pleased with all the help I got in the Academy to make the transition to becoming a fully-fledged financial adviser with my own business. It’s a programme that I really recommend to others looking for a new career.