I want to move to a really great city, which, I realize, are terribly expensive. Unfortunately, my education and experience lock me into a small set of industries which, while pretty good for jobs, operate only in crap cities. My plan to save up until I can quit and retire early is not working as quickly as I had hoped. I have a bad feeling that I will be 70 before I can go wherever I want, at which point I would have been better off living somewhere expensive for 45 years. I’m too damn old for more school, especially considering that the salary I’d have to forgo would set me back even farther. Is there some job that can be done without specialized education and experience, or am I better off attempting to climb the ladder to, at best, low level management in about 20 years?
You could try to transition into sales. Good sales skills are considered a fungible skill through which you can transition from your current, dead-end industry sector into a sector with better potential.
While sales requires a different skill set, it generally doesn’t require a different education (training courses and workshops are generally short-term).
The downside, of course, is that you live and die by your current production, and that insecurity can be tremendously successful.
I think a little more info is needed to give you a good answer. It would help to know more about your current skill set and what you consider a good city. Are you talking NYC/Bay Area with stratospheric housing costs or just something nice by the ocean or in the mountains?
One field that gets its share of mid-career folks not looking to get a ton more education is real estate.
If your education includes a bachelor’s degree already, a lot of places have transitional programs to help you move into teaching, a skill that, while not high paying, is needed just about everywhere.
I guess it would have been helpful to give more background. I have an MS in geology, I work as a geologist for an energy company. I have a lot of experience in oil and gas prospecting, drilling wells, and dealing with regulatory agencies and lawyers. I have a little professional experience in the geotechnical and environmental side of geology. I have picked up some industry-specific knowlege about engineering and the acquisition and divestiture of leases and mineral rights. I can use a number of computer applications that are useless outside the industry.
As for where I’d like to go, I’m looking for somewhere more progressive and modern than Oklahoma, with more to do. I’d go to Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston, but while nice enough, they are not dream locations and the pay cut would keep me stuck there for even longer than here. Places I’d really like to live (that I’ve actually been to): Hawaii, Seattle, Portland WA, Austin, Albuquerque, Santa Fe medium to large Colorado front range cities, the Carolinas, Nashville, Knoxville, Chicago, northern California.
Have you considered working as a Geologist for the Federal Government?
There’s an opening in Seattle and one in Vancouver, WA (which is across from Portland, OR) too. Being willing to move around a bit can be an advantage to getting promoted in the Federal Government as well.
It would probably help if you could give us an idea of how much you’re hoping to make in your new city. One of those jobs starts at 57K and one at 69K but I understand that you may be used to making more and need a higher paying job.
You might want to contact fellow Doper, LVgeogeek, here in Las Vegas. They know quite a bit about your field and can probably give you some good advice.
I assume you are not looking to move abroad? There are plenty of geologists with experience in prospecting for energy sources who are working in what I consider to be very cool places like Indonesia and Egypt. As you probably have far more insight into than I ever will, the “real work” tends to be done in remote locations as opposed to in big cities (for example, in northern Sumatra or along the Sinai Peninsula). Such locations are everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure … and even if these sorts of places sound appealing, practical considerations like other family members can mean such a posting is out of the question. But personally, I would take such a position in an instant if my circumstances made such a thing possible.
You might consider trying to move into something more of a “technical writing” or advertising sort of job, if you think you would have any talent for it. I assume that there’s any amount of that sort of thing needed in the industry but lacking people who have the hands-on knowledge, and those would be jobs that are more HQ-based than on-site.
Plenty of work as well in Western Australia or Queensland at the moment, anywhere with coal or iron ore deposites are taking all the workers they can get. I read in todays days paper that EVERY possible exploration lease in WA has been taken up. The hardest part would be finding accomadation.
How about the securities industry? No additional schooling required, just studying for two tests. Knowledge of the oil and gas industry would be very helpful in certain areas of the industry. As far as the cities go, New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco are the leading cities in the US, but most major cities have opportunities.