How do I figure out what it is I want to do with my career?
This week marks my 8th year of working in IT, and I have been feeling more and more that I am ready to move onto something different. Both my undergraduate and masters degrees were in the arts (Japanese, and Linguistics respectively), and I just sort of fell into IT as a job because I was always good with computers and it seemed like it had a pretty great pay-to-effort ratio. Now that I am approaching the decade mark, I feel like it's not what I want to do any more. Even my current job (which I once described as my dream role) has lost its sheen, and the prospect of spending the rest of my working life having to study and learn new technologies, and keep up with the latest developments just fills me with dread. I don't want to be in my fifties and reading endless documentation to try and understand why MacJibbleGPT is now the preferred way to skilter a virtualised quallock. In short, I would like to relegate my computing to the level of "hobby."
The problem is, I really don't know what I would like to do instead. The last time I had an idea of a career that I wanted to follow was as a teenager when I wanted to be a doctor, but I didn't get the grades. Since then I've just sort of fallen from thing to thing, and been a bit directionless, just assuming that IT would be enough to carry me through my working life, and focus on my hobbies for fulfilment. Well my hobbies are now very fulfilling, but they just make the slog of the work day even harder.
So how do I go about figuring out what it is that I want to do? I have done a few quizzes online (via reputable organisations), I've contemplated the jobs of my friends and family, and I still just feel like nothing is inspiring me. There are a few problems that I need to try and work around with finding something new as well:
- At least for the next 6 years or so, I am geographically fairly restricted to being within a reasonable driving distance to my daughter's home
- Shit is expensive, so I need to minimise the hit to my salary
- I do not have the money to get a degree or similar vocational qualification
- I would like stable hours, and not to work weekends or evenings (this is more job-specific than it is career-specific)
- Hybrid working is preferable to full-time in the office or full-time WFH (ditto)
So I ask my fellow Tilderen, have you ever pivoted into a completely different career after several years of investing your time into another? How did it go? How did you go about figuring out what you wanted to do instead? What advice would you have for me, a nearly-31-year-old who still has most of her working life ahead of her?
So, I have read two useful and contrasting books on the subject that I think complement each other well, What Color is Your Parachute, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58841040-what-color-is-your-parachute-2022?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_18 and Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13525945-so-good-they-can-t-ignore-you?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18
When it comes to employment, I think about it as picking your preferred flavor of shit sandwich. We all have different deal breakers and can tolerate some specific inconveniences and not others.
. I have also known people be very successful in niche small businesses for example a reupholsterer/interior design specialist and an arborist. This thread is a Tildes discussion about where there is demand for employees. https://tildes.net/~talk/17nk/what_are_industries_and_specialties_where_you_see_demand_for_employees
But even within IT, there are some very stable jobs. I know someone who manages databases for a university. He is highly valued, has great benefits, and likes his life.
You started exploring by making this thread. Keep doing that sort of thing whether it is reading or networking or applying for jobs in industries you want to learn more about.
I also recomment 'What Colour is Your Parachute'.
It was given to me in my early 30s and I found it very useful. I was able to transition into my preferred job (business analyst) a couple of years later. I knew what I wanted to do (as, it turns out, I was partially already there with my job at that time), but I didn't know how to articulate it or even if was a 'real' job.
I've considered trade work as well, as there's not likely to stop being demand for it any time soon. Each time I think about it I have to overcome a little bit of classism and some tangled gender nonsense, since they're such traditionally masculine jobs. But the idea of working with my hands is very appealing, as is being my own boss.
The caveat with being an electrician is that it takes a long time before you can be your own boss. Like 10 years minimum before you can go off on your own. In the meantime, you are in an industry that very heavily pushes overtime work on you. I thought the same thing and made my way into an IBEW apprenticeship, but it is no walk in the park. You will be out in extreme heat and cold depending on the season and location you're in and have no real refuge from it. You will be constantly exhausted from working long hours lifting heavy objects and moving a lot. I found that I was so tired after work that I wasn't doing hobbies, but immediately planting myself on the couch. I had no energy to do the things I liked like gaming, hiking, and biking. You are doing damage to your body on a daily basis. There is no real harm mitigation in the trades, just harm reduction. You are still inhaling silica dust because someone doesn't want to use a shop vac while drilling concrete. There are fumes from different solvents in the air at all times. Your body never gets to fully recover from the load you are placing on it every day. If you exercise, you can listen to your body and go easy if you need to. If you are tired from construction, you still have to go to work if you want to pay your bills.
I wish I knew. I think it's especially difficult with the growing wealth inequality, with wages not keeping up with cost of living, with inflation. I used to work in IT and I burned out. Then I did my own artistic thing for seven years, made a lot less money, struggled, and set myself back some years. Now I'm a developer and looking to move toward DevOps to bridge my development skills and sysadmin skills.
While I do love technology (a lot, actually), I'd much rather be doing the art thing. I do admit I burned out on it, but that's because the way I did it kind of painted me into a corner and it was hard to pivot. The reality is, though, is that tech work pays really well for the effort you need to put in. Sure, you have to do self-study occasionally, but that effort pays dividends. This stuff comes easy to me, the money is there, so I've just kind of resigned to the idea that I need to do this, especially now that I'm in my 40s.
I think as the years go on, the economy is going to get even harder on working class people. Make decisions that will set you up to have the most comfortable life. I don't regret my time outside of tech, because I did some cool stuff, I lived my dream, I had a lot of fun. But it was objectively a bad decision. Instead of blowing up my career, I should have just found a new job. I was really just tired of what I was doing at that specific job. I'd be in a lot better financial place today if I had just moved to something else in tech.
I don't have much to add about finding your dream job, but I have been in similar positions and just wanted to chime in and maybe make you (or anyone else in a similar position) feel a bit better about your choices:
I too have an undergraduate and masters degree in the humanities. I too had always been good with computers. Except I now work in the humanities. And let me tell you, it is difficult. The main complaint that I hear with people in the field of humanities is the pay. There are days that I like my job. There are days where I love my job. And there are days where I ask myself "why the hell didn't you pursue some boring old IT job and make triple what you're making now like most of your friends did?". Sure it wouldn't be what I would absolutely love, but the increased pay and benefits would allow me to retire sooner. They'd allow me to take more vacations and time off in general. They'd allow me to save more while still having enough to not nickel and dime every facet of my life.
So yeah. I'm not telling you you're wrong, or trying to dissuade you from changing careers, or anything like that. I just wanted to make you feel a bit better about the choices you've made thus far in your life. I'm you from the other universe where you pursued the arts instead of IT. And I can tell you that the grass isn't necessarily greener over here. There are days when it is, and there are days when it isn't. There are days when I find myself asking the exact same thing as you, but in reverse.
That being said, I hope you find the career change that you're looking for! Sometimes I catch myself complaining about choices I've made in the past and time I've wasted doing X when I could have been doing Y instead and I have to remind myself that it's alright and that I should look towards the future instead of beating myself up for choices I made under different circumstances and without the benefit of hindsight.
Also, use MacJibbleGPT if you want, but I prefer my quallocks unskiltered.
I don't know if this can be considered as any sort of advice, but I'd love to share my experience, as someone who started a new career at 32 and am now 37.
I worked in tech (specifically video games and interactive media) from 2008 to 2018. Started as freelance, working at coffee shops and grocery stores to make ends meet until 2013 when I found a full time situation. I did creative direction, project management, technical art, and design roles. Eventually the client work started sucking my soul out and I similarly started feeling dread when thinking about my future.
The biggest thing for me was identifying what I did not want to keep, and what I did want to keep, in regards to what I actually do day to day. Example is:
Keep - project management is fun and I think I'm good at it. It tranlsates well to ALL other industries
Keep - technical skills, good at implementing software and translating engineer speak to non engineers
Discard - working with fortune 500 companies. While it looks nice on a resume, it is part of what sucked my soul, so I discarded this idea
Discard - competitive and unpredictable field of tech that is brand new (AR and VR bullshit. Cannot even imagine navigating AI.....)
Keep - being part of a close team, not entirely independent
These are just quick examples but I really went very deep with this exercise. I did hard analysis of every project and skill that I had, and wrote down the things that brought me joy, or feelings of success. And identified the things that I absolutely wanted to avoid. It was hard because some of the things to avoid were things I am really good at.
Once I had this understanding, I made a separate list of things I considered myself to be searching for, or missing from my current role. For me it had a lot to do with values. My values are not personally tied to making as much money as possible and being as impressive and competitive as I can. Those things are cool, and I respect people that embrace that, but it left me feeling empty. I knew that I wanted my future to include being around people who shared my values, and companies with mission statements I felt worthy of dedicating myself to. So I started asking questions like "what sort of company values xyz" and "what sort of industry has a need for skil xyz" It was important to me tobe able to make deeper connections with people I work beside every day, which I always felt unable to do in tech.
I did a lot of interviewing, and asked the interviewers a lot of questions about the things that were important to me. I noticed a pattern with companies in agriculture, and so I finally decided to take a more entry level job with plants. I definitely ended up taking a pay cut at first, but it was easy for me to see the path upward so I knew that paycut was a temporary thing, and long term it was helping me achieve my goals. Agriculture companies often fall way behind in technology and organization, project management stuff. Plant people avoid that shit. They need people who can support them that way and keep them organized and efficient, so they can focus on plant health. Plant people are also generally the kindest people, they love dirt and animals and growing things and feeding people. It was a welcome change in atmosphere. The paycut thing was hard, my trajectory is below. First 2 years were strugglebus....
Year 1 - 50k
Year 2 - 58k
Year 2.5 - 65k (promotion!)
Year 3 - 88k (bigger promotion)
Year 4 - no change
Year 5 - 105k
5 years on, I am making more money than I was in tech, feeling less competitive and more collaborative, and get the added bonus of learning all sorts of shit about farming from plant nerds :) in short though, you have to be unafraid to discard the skills you don't want to be using anymore, even if they are strong skills. Build a resume that only has things you would feel excited to keep doing, and then see where that resume meets a need. So many tech skills are needed in non-tech industries.
This reply is interesting to me. I see some parallels to my own experience. But at the same time I feel like I've veered off into some no man's land again and I don't know how to get back (or maybe I don't want to go back?)
I also started with freelance work—writing—until I stumbled into a full-time role at a startup as an analyst. Fortunately, I was never directly client-facing. But, I frequently worked with Sales so I was one-step removed.
After a few years, like you, I got the idea in my head to focus on what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to discard. I also did a lot of interviewing, and in some cases, was the one asking for more interviews with progressively senior people—just so I could get definitive yes/nos on my wants/discards. I "settled" for that because I couldn't get my employment contracts modified to align to clearly state my wants, etc. Unsurprisingly, companies are inflexible about modifying their contract language on an employee-by-employee basis (at least, at my pay grade).
Even with that extra effort though, it just takes a manager change to throw all those verbal promises out the window. Or, it doesn't even take a manager change actually—I had one manager who said I wouldn't be expected to interact with customers turn around two years later, telling me to start interacting with customers. (The actual situation was a bit more complicated because there was a question of foreign language ability, and some unrealistic expectations around how quickly I could learn that language).
Went through something similar with my most recent job too, to which I responded by I quitting outright without a backup plan. Too burnt out by experiencing a string of the same issues in different permutations I guess. That was back at the beginning of this year.
I'm glad that switching to agriculture worked for you though. I sort of have the same idea in my head, not about agriculture, but about a lateral into a different role or industry (maybe it's just Sales org middle-managers who end up being Hershey stains?) but now I'm even struggling to just contact people or apply to jerbs.
So my initial thoughts reading your post which maybe off base. You had interest in medicine at one point. You have IT skills. You're looking at remote or hybrid roles. I would suggest you look into program management in Healthcare specifically insurance companies, pharmacy, medical research. It's a growing field, pay is likely on par of what you're looking for, and you'd likely have crossover skills, it's one of the industries that is embracing remote/hybrid roles.
Could you elaborate on what this means? It's something I've heard of or am familiar with, and we Brits may have a different way of referring to the same thing ;)
Absolutely, I jokingly refer to it as the cat herder. Sometimes as whack-a-mole like role. Typically it's the person who analysis if a program is functioning as expected, are new projects to help the program to succeed needed and if so theyll also usually wear the project manager hat. Write up how we are meeting our program goals. It's very much an operational role and maybe referred that way elsewhere or at least that's the wheelhouse it's usually in. A lot of healthcare is about standing up the next program to improve health outcomes, not sure if that's how it goes in Britian but here state side it's focus on this thing and we need to pivot to do that, than we adjust for the next big news item. Right now the big push state side is health equity, or whole population health, and focus is on maternal health outcomes, diabetes, heart disease and how different health populations are impacted.
Being able to query, analyze data, and build a presentation are the core functions often of the roles I've seen.
However would love to see what others know as maybe my work is more niche than I realized
I was in your shoes a few years ago and made a big pivot from heritage conservation to ecological management. The two are seemingly unrelated but I used my background in remote sensing to make the transition smoother. I also went back to school for a masters to help build out my network in the new space and understand some of the science behind what I would be assessing. I work in a very different space now, with a very different vibe but with similar technology. I'm really happy with the switch. I believe I could have made the transition to another focus area (i.e. deployment of green grey infrastructure) if I had decided in the program, but I took the easy route.
To start out with the positives, you have pretty deep experience with IT and those are skills that will be in demand in any industry. I know you've said that you'd like to relegate your computing to the level of hobby, but I'd keep it in your back pocket as those may be the skills that get you hired. But to your point, hired where? With all the restrictions you mentioned, it may be difficult to truly pivot out of IT. Perhaps consider what industries you would like to support or if there are direct/similar positions where you could use your skills.
For selecting a field, that's a pretty personal journey. I have the opposite problem to you where every day a new industry sounds interesting. For a while I was really interested in alternative packaging, things like using fungi instead of packing peanuts or chiton based plastics. So basically material science. Then it was large scale green civil engineering projects, like the Netherland's "Sand Engine". Then it was urban design and passive climate systems. Hell, I always think about joining an agro-ecology apprentice to get into farming. Or some days I wish I would have followed my dad and been a general contractor. I worked with him a lot growing up, and while it's hard work, the satisfaction from tangible projects is really satisfying. When I was a teenager my dad told me he'd chop my hands off if I picked up a hammer or paint brush, but now it's quite a lucrative business.
Career transitions can be tough and I'm always happy to chat more about it.
There are three basic approaches I have seen.
Stay in tech, but move into a non tech role. Product Management. Customer Success. Project Management. You will have to sell yourself into the new role.
Stay in tech, but completely move fields. Go back to school, and become an educator specialized... in tech probably.... which means you still need to learn new tech, but at a broader level. Say goodbye to your salary.
Train up in a completely unrelated field. Become a medical tech for instance. You are effectively restarting your career. Say goodbye to your salary.
I personally did the first one, but I have friends and colleagues who did 2 & 3.