[QUOTE=mnemosyne]
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…
[/QUOTE]
My reaction: “oh God, yes”
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