I am considering what other fields I might enjoy. My plan to date has been real estate by day, musician by night, with the overall goal of creating music that is marketable and eventually replace the real estate day job with one that is music-related. However, I spend so much time at my day job that I feel like I’m wasting my life being miserable in my day job.
It’s taken me 5 years in commercial real estate to get to where I’m at now, where I’m finally making decent money. My company is a chaotic mess, however, and it is getting very difficult to make it in to the office everyday, as I am starting to loathe my job. Since I am considering getting a new job, I can not help but think that this real estate gig is not for me. It makes me nervous to say so, since the majority of people I know are trying to get IN to real estate, not out. I have an excellent resume, etc., but fear starting back at square on in another industry.
Have any of you made career changes? I’d like to read about your experiences. I would be willing to take a pay cut, a substantial one at that, if I could actually feel good about what I do from 8am to 6pm. It’s nice having some money to play with, but I’d rather enjoy my career since I will need to do it for a lifetime.
I tried a career change that went terribly. I went to college for multimedia design, graduated and got a job as an animator and multimedia designer. I hated it though. I quit to pursue my “real” calling as a… well… I’m not sure exactly what I was going for. I spent a couple of years totally broke but freelancing, taking whatever jobs I could that were vaguely in my field, including animation, illustration, website design, portraits, murals, CD-ROM authoring, you name it. Part of me loved it, since I could make my own hours and do what I wanted. Most of me hated it because I couldn’t do “exclusively” what I wanted to do. In addition to actually doing the work, I also had to do sales calls, meetings, home visits, cold calls, free mock-ups, etc.
I also had to take some part time jobs to finish making ends meet, so during this time I also edited wedding videos, framed pictures at an art gallery, worked at Kinko’s, and sold cell phones.
Eventually I looked at my life and hated it. I used to have a job in the field I went to school for, and even though I had some complaints, it was a steady paycheck and a job that actually ENDED when I went home, instead of staying at home and being constantly on call, feeling guilty when I wasn’t looking for jobs and doing free work to get my foot in the door somewhere.
So I found my current job designing websites for an insurance company. The pay and benefits are fantastic and I (mostly) like it. I have some complaints, like everyone, but my favorite part about the job is that I get to go home and relax, not worrying about being outbid on a project or having a contract fall through.
Do I feel like a corporate sell-out? A little, sure, but on the other hand I go home at 5 and get to do whatever I want from then until I go to bed and on the weekends. And rest assured, I spend that time on my hobbies like making internet TV shows, podcasts, doing illustrations, working on my own site. They all have the goal of being self-sufficient someday, maybe enabling me to quit my job again and have a steady income, but if not, I’m loving them as hobbies.
There’s my long-winded story. I’m glad I took the leap and gave it a shot, since I won’t spend the rest of my life thinking “what if…”. It was a rough few years, but incredibly educational.
I’m working on one, and have been for the last four years. It’s better to do the groundwork while you still have the safety net of a regular job.
I kind of fell into my first career, and while I like it all right, I’m at the point where I’d have to relocate to continue in it at my pay grade, or make a lateral/backwards jump to a local company to stay in it here. I don’t really like the industry enough to take a big pay cut.
But for the last few years, I’ve been getting educated in and getting licenses in something I’ve chosen. I’ve owned my own small business in that industry for a few years, so I know that I like it and that I’m good at it. I’m not considering making the business my sole support (hey, I have kids to feed) but one of my contracts is looking very likely to develop into a regular full-time job for me. It’ll be a step back in pay for now, but the benefits of no longer working year-to-year and the potential to move forward again, when I was staring at a brick wall, are what make it worth it.
But if I were to have to jump clear from one industry to another with no training or education, I’d have to take a huge loss. Think about getting some certifications on the side in something that you’re interested in before you quit the real estate gig.
Thanks for sharing, it is helpful to hear what others with similar situations are doing. I guess I’m lucky to have a decent paying job . . . it might take the struggle of trying something new before I’ll fully appreciate it.
I am in the process of changing jobs. Well, not really, I guess I already have.
Since high school, I have done various warehouse and factory jobs with a few odd jobs thrown in. When I was about 26 I looked around and said “this sucks,” and went to college. I thought pharmacist (worked in a pharmacy for a year as a tech, hated it), then biochemist, (came to realize I’m not smart enough), and now Information Technology. I hope to do either database administration, web application development or start my own online business.
I have one year left and I am kind of dreading it. Getting a job already looks tough, since all the job listings expect 2-3 years experience or more.
I changed careers and it’s worked out well for me. After finishing my undergrad, I worked for a payday loan company for several years, ending up as an internal auditor with them. Various things led to me being laid off about 6 months after a move to a new city, where I got a job with another company as an internal auditor. Two years into that, I realized that I hated internal audit, that it was not what I ever wanted to do. I took the GREs, applied to grad school and now I’m a librarian.
I love this job. Sure, I hate where I now live (NE Ohio), but I love the job. I like the people I work with, at least most of the time and I’m very happy to have made the change.
So, IMO, if you can swing the career change to something you love and really want to be doing, do it. You spend too much time at work to not at least like it - and if you love it, so much the better.
I’m considering a career change too. I have a BSc in Biochemistry and work as an analytical chemist for a pharmaceutical company, and I despise it. It’s so mundane and routine, and there is nowhere to go… no “up” from the job I’m in (there also isn’t really a “down”!) The rest of the industry doesn’t appeal to me much, so I’m looking elsewhere. Sooner or later, I’ll choose something to try out. At least I have something to fall back on…
I started at a preschool as an aide so my daughter could attend and ended up taking classes and being a teacher, then director. I got divorced when I was 32 and went back to school at 34 and got my RN. Changing careers is one of the best things I ever did. My RN has taken me from warm and fuzzy postpartum to high-risk Labor and Delivery, non-adrenaline junkies need not apply, to case management; tree killing is our business. ( I swim in paperwork, I backstroke, I am Esther Williams…)
I love my career and would keep my RN should I win the lottery someday.
HIJACK ALERT: TV and movies do nursing a huge disservice by promoting the idea of just the hospital floor nurse. There are lots of jobs for nurses; some in offices and some in helicopters.
I was considering going to college for chemistry. But when I asked about it, everybody said “beh, it’s all right; the college itself is hard, but once you’re through you usually work as a lab tech, it’s all routine, very safe, you can spend most of the day sitting on your ass waiting for the samples to come in and nobody says ‘why aren’t you working’…”
Went ChemEng because I met the librarian of the only college in Spain that taught ChemEng and he talked about “flexibility” and “international projection” and “we have people who work in sales, as factory managers, building factories, as process engineers, lots of different fields.”
I’ve changed career paths several times (although always building on previous skills: remember, what defines a job is not its name but its skillset) and visited over a dozen countries for work. International projection and flexibility, oh yeah. Guess the librarian was right, at least in my case
I’ve “abandoned” a job without having another one lined up twice. The first time, when my research advisor said he wasn’t going to allow me to graduate in less than the 11 years he’d calculated he could have me for free, since I was “the best researcher I’ve ever known and a fucking foreigner who can’t go anywhere without my permission.” Note if you ever run into one of my people: don’t ever tell a Navarrese “you can’t do it, I won’t let you” unless either you’re navarrese yourself or you really, really want them to do it. 2 months unemployed before getting a job as a pharma researcher.
The second time, it was that pharma researcher job. The company and I had different ideas re. how to deal with INS. If I did what they wanted me to do, I would have been breaking the law and I wouldn’t have been able to see my father again before he died (he’d been battling with cancer for almost a year at that point). So I packed up and went back to Spain, with no safety net except a sick father and a completely-dedicated-to-him mother. It was a couple years of odd jobs (translator, lab tech with month-long contracts to cover maternal leaves or sick leaves or vacation, a job calling supplier companies in Asia to verify when orders for key components would be available… if I had the skill I’d take it, helped me build contacts and show that I wasn’t too hoity-toity for “real work”).
Then I got a job as an analytical tech; at one point the two of us who’d been hired at the same time got fired but I got rehired phew. Later there was a company project I was asked to join, did, then was offered an internal-and-international promotion which came with expiration date, took it. When the project finished they didn’t know what to do with the four Euros in the international team so they fired us.
I searched for jobs as lab tech (“too experienced”), lab manager (“not experienced enough”) and telling lab managers what to do, which had been the gist of the international job: “just so”, apparently, because that’s what I got hired to do.
Like I said at the start, I don’t look at it in terms of “career paths” (hey, I went to college in the 30% unemployment years, no that’s not an extra zero, Spaniards my age don’t believe in career paths), but in terms of skillsets and of enjoying the work. Of course being able to eat three squares, keep a roof over my head and stuff like that is also a requirement
Cyn, you’d probably like Spanish series Hospital Central. One of its premises is that lab work doesn’t get done in five minutes (specially bio work); they have nurses in copters and nurses in offices and doctors in sales and people who take mistakes in stride and people who don’t and some pregnant woman who was treated after an accident will show up two years later because the kid had a bad reaction to a vaccination and there was a janitor who later became a nurse (he sometimes says “hey, I still remember how to push a cart, but now I can take temperatures too!”) and there’s been times when two people wanted each other’s jobs and there was a lot of grumping around until they realized they wanted each other’s jobs and got the paperwork done and switched…
I am not, nor have I ever been, an English teacher. But it might be worth thinking about taking a course to get yourself certified to teach English, then live for a couple of years overseas teaching it. The pay for that type of work is lousy here in Thailand, so a lot of the teachers here tend to be unqualified. However, I understand that in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, maybe China, the pay is quite good, and you even get free accommodation. Teaching’s not for everyone, I doubt I could have the patience to be a good teacher, but many find it a rewarding break from life back home.
A friend of mine was visiting Kaoshiung, in southern Taiwan, and he was approached on the street by a lady asking him if he wanted to teach English and start right away. Like right then and there! He looked over, and there was the school, and all of these moon-faced children peering out the window wondering, “Is this our new English teacher?” He declined, of course, but there is a market, and the qualified teachers – even if it’s just a basic certification course – get the plum assignments. And it’s interesting living abroad, especially in the Third World. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.
I’m looking for a new career path as well. I got laid off on January 9th and I’ve been out of work since then.
I’ve been in the mortgage business for about 4 years and I was making pretty decent money but I’m dead sick of it. I can’t stand the type of people that the industry attracts (zombies in the office and weasels outisde [sales]) and there is absolutely zero creativity or variation in the work. The money is good but eventually hits a ceiling unless you are a sales person or have a business degree - neither of which I aspire to.
The problem I’m having is that I’ve got a lifestyle that is proportional to my income (house, 2 new cars, etc) and I can’t think of any way to support myself without getting another mortgage job. It’s a very frustrating situation.
I’d like to get a degree but can’t find the time or the money.
Nava - that’s actually it - very routine day-to-day, which makes you wonder why you bothered with all that schooling when a well trained monkey could do the job.
One of the things I’m considering is going back to school for a whole new undergrad degree - in Engineering. I like reading your posts, since it gives me a sense of what it might be like to work in that kind of field. I think I’d like Mechanical/Aeronautical (I think ChemEng would be a little too much overlap with what I hate now!) but then again, the MATH just terrifies me! I have a very encouraging husband and family, but I look at that course curriculum and basically start to panic “because I don’t know how to do that!” Of course, that’s what school is for… to LEARN how to “do that” but, well, it’s scary.
Congrats to all of you who have actually done it and come out the other side.
Go get that engineering degree, you will not regret it. I spent 22 years working at different construction related jobs and raising a family. When my youngest moved out, I decided that i needed a change and just went for it, even though I was terrified of possibly failing (HS dropout). 4 years later upon graduation with a BS in Civil Engineering, I got a job as a Project Manager on a 25M job and am not looking back.
I have THE EXACT same opinion of your “typical” person in the industry. The sales people have personalities, but generally speaking, thier egos are out of control and many are in fact weasels. The rest of the people are robotic bankers . . . no personality whatsoever. It’s an unpleasant state of affairs.
What I need to do is hang tight and get my album done WITHOUT quitting my job, as painful as that will be. It’s hard to be creative and inspired when you feel like you spend your whole day being walked on. If I get no indication that the completed album has any commercial viability, then it’s time to swtich my dayjob as well. This is a 1-year or so timeline, so I think I can manage it.
Good luck, and I mean that sincerely. Two months ago I was in your position. I was doing pre-production work on a documentary film that I was planning to make, and my plan was to make it until mid-March WITHOUT quitting my job. Just when it looked like I was home free I got laid off (Jan. 9th) and the documentary seems like a distant memory now.
