Your contract wording is very similar to the one I use, however I refer specifically to competing businesses. As I’m a salon and surrounded by businesses that are not like mine - either Spas, niche beauty:brow bars, nail bars etc, my competition are basically the one of two businesses who use the same brands. These businesses would benefit if they had a ready trained employee that I paid ££££’s to train.
I go through contracts with my Team every year so that they understand what is and is not ok and we agree what is fair. However, some years ago I let a therapist go, very discreetly, suggesting that she find herself another job before I fired her for poor performance. She left to work in a non competing business, only to sneak off and join the competition 6 weeks later, and we then had clients no show which suggested that she’d contacted them using stolen data. She sent texts to my staff saying “that there was nothing I could do”. It was very upsetting.
Even though she was legally in the wrong, I couldn’t really do very much. I didn’t want to get involved suing her for her training costs, which only left me with the option of taking out a Court Injunction against her employer, which would cost about £6k. As I hadn’t suffered nearly enough financial loss to make that a sensible thing to do I had a solicitor write some unpleasant letters and left it at that. I received some solicitor’s letters back and had the consolation of knowing that it cost her Daddy a lot of money.
My solicitor specifically said that I couldn’t ban her from earning a living. I sent him a list of all the businesses that I would have had no issue with her working for that were walking distance from her home and a list of those that I considered were competition and he agreed that this was fair and binding.
I then had another girl leave and lie about where she went. I eventually discovered that she has also joined the competition, but I definitely hadn’t lost any business. I let it go.
So speaking as an employer, with insurance and legally binding contracts, I’d say go for it! As long as you don’t do anything illegal like steal client data, don’t try and poach clients or staff during working hours or use information that you only have through your employment and don’t break any other terms of your contract, you’ll be fine.
depending on your relationship with your Boss you might want to be upfront with them about what you are doing,