My wife is spending a year or two at home right now with the babies, and then, it shall be time to find a new career. She’s been a teacher off and on for several years, but does not think it will be a good idea to go back into it. Still, she doesn’t want to stay at home forever. So, she’s been kicking around ideas trying to figure out what to get into when she finally does go back to school or back on the job market.
I have a question about a specific type of career. Remember the female carpenter on the show Trading Spaces? (Googling turns up Amy Wynn Pastor–however I could swear the person I’m thinking of was Asian. But anyway, point is: Female carpenter.) My wife would have really enjoyed doing something like that.
She’s also mentioned–wistfully if you can imagine it!–the idea of being a car mechanic.
Gardening and landscaping are also things she–inexplicably to me–enjoys doing. But of course, here there’s doubtful to be any money and no room for professional advancement. Just mentioning it because I’m building up a theme here.
The theme is: Work which heavily involves the hands, tinkering and forming, craftsmanship to at least some extent. That kind of thing.
She has absolutely no professional experience with anything like this. She’d be starting from square one. And so my question is–is the idea of a woman at the age of 36 or so (i.e. when she begins seriously looking for a way to start off down a new career path) getting into any kind of work that fits the above theme, with no very considerable experience, but most preferably in a field that admits of degrees of proficiency, expertise, and responsibility, is this a complete pipe dream? Your humble opinion please.
I’d be cautious about getting into a physically demanding line of work at that age. At 34 she still feels young, but another 10-15 years down the road that may not be the case, and it will be even harder to switch career paths at that point in life.
Frylock, if you and Mrs. Lock are otherwise able to support the family financially (and it sounds like you are), then I say Go For It. You have the freedom for her to explore a line of work that is rewarding, she’d be flexible in the transitioning from family home care to a gradual ramp up into Career #2, including possible volunteer work to gain or get experience, and if what she finds is truly rewarding then your lives, including your kids’, will be that much richer.
If on the other hand you would meed to rely on her second income then there are other practical concerns, including what Oakminster said.
What is her background and education? Why doesn’t she want to return to teaching? What did she like and dislike about it?
She is nowhere near too old to start a new career, but her thoughts at the moment don’t seem to be very fully thought out. We are going through some tough economic times right now, and starting ANY career is going to be tough. She will need to be very smart about what opportunities are actually out there, what her competition is, what hard skills she needs and what career advancement looks like. The career market is to tough to enter into it without a very thorough understanding of the risks and opportunities.
One thing to remember with any kind of manual labor is that she will be competing with immigrants and young people without the option to go into a white collar field, and they may be willing to work harder for cheaper than she can, because that’s the only chance they’ve got to make a living. Someone who is in it to tinker and mess around is not going to last long against people who are hungry and really need the work. A lot of my family worked in construction and house painting, and over the years they’ve found they have been priced out of the market by people who are willing to work twelve hour days for less than a middle class income. All of them have since retrained for white-collar jobs (including teaching).
Wood and construction materials are too expensive to put in the hands of amateurs. If she wants to build construction skills, a good place to start would be volunteering on a community theater stage crew. It’s a reasonable opportunity to learn basic construction in a place where it’s okay if everything not perfect.
Does she do anything more traditionally crafty? She might try crafting stuff and selling it on Etsy now, and try to build it into a more sustainable hobby-business. It’s going to be tough and take business saavy to make it anything more than that.
That’s a final thing to consider. In all of these fields, advancing your career means you move away from actually working with your hands and in to actually managing a business.
Anyway, if she has a dream, she should go for it. But a loose collection of thoughts and vague yearning is not a dream. This whole thing needs a lot more thought put into it.
Helicopter mechanic. Good pay, plenty of jobs, takes 2-3 years of either hands-on experience or an FAA approved course to get jobs. More fun than a car mechanic and less risk of downsizing than a fixed-wing mechanic. Work available at plants and later with private companies operating EMS, schools, tourism, etc.
FTR, my husband started his training as a helicopter pilot one week after his 35th birthday. Took about 2 years to get all his training, certificates, and first job. Took another 3 years to get back to up to the salary he made as a webmaster. He’s been flying for 15 years now and willl probably fly another 15, so this is by no means a short-term career. Mid-thirties seems like a good time to make a change.
Do you live near a major city? I ask because many large cities have requirements that a certain percentage of their contracts go to minority and woman-owned businesses, and additionally, that a certain amount of the labor force be minority and/or female and/or local. I have attended regular contract meetings during which the contractor was raked over the coals for not having enough hours worked by female laborers. These are skilled trades, construction, union.
It’s a large commitment to enter a skilled trade and work one’s way up, but in specific locales, if you’re a female in the trade you will be in demand.
I’m a 31 year old male who is built for manual labor and I am absolutely terrified to death that I’ll still be doing it in 5 years. There are some older guys doing my job (in their 40’s) but not many. I don’t want to say she can’t do it, but it might take more time and effort and education to get into it than she will recoup in what will likely be a fairly brief career.
Maybe you could encourage her to build a pergola or rebuild a Volkswagen engine or something? She could get her feet wet and see if she enjoys the work or enjoys a romanticized idea of the work.
Just to clarify, while I haven’t communicated even a fraction of her thoughts to you, on the other hand, it is true that her thoughts are basically at the “omg what am I going to do?” stage rather than “let’s make a plan” stage. No one is under any illusions otherwise, ya dig?
I’ll mention the helicopter thing and the community theater volunteering thing to her, these sound like things that might perk her interests.
To answer a question from above, she does do crafty stuff, but does not see it as a plausible “career” activity. Everybody and their dog has an etsy page after all…
BA: Emergency Management, 2000
Certifications: Several relating to education
Professional work experience: Teaching eighth grade science, total of three years. Teaching several subjects at a private high school, total of one year. Tutoring students in all subjects at a high school computer lab, total of one year.
Other work experience: TSA agent for four years. Homemaker… does anyone buy calling that “work experience” yet?
She just basically really hates it. She only did it because the opportunity kind of fell in her lap at the time and she did not percieve herself as having anything better going. She finds teaching to be almost completely unrewarding, and she hates everything about the beaurocracy and most of the kids and parents.
This much is pretty clear without needing to be explained, of course. My hope is that maybe she won’t start looking for a couple of years (or she’ll do the college-with-loans route) and when she does start looking the economy will be working better than it is now. But you can’t plan on hopes of course…
Yes, this is a problem. I’m hoping to find out about “tinker and mess around” type work which requires the kinds of educational opportunities that are available to her that aren’t available to the people who will work 12 hour days because it’s their only chance. Terrible personal issue, though–she has a severe, uncurable (afaict and I’ve known her 16 years) math phobia, as well as, almost certainly, discalculia. So alot of the “educated tinker and mess” type jobs I can think of (i.e. engineering jobs) seem to be right out.
Yes, this is very clear and does not have to be explained to anyone.
