To ask how you get a bloody job 😐

How many years did you work for pre kids & how many were you off for?

A friend of mine who worked in recruitment once said to me every year you have off, its like knocking a year off your experience you had, in terms of the work you can access on return

There is not a glut of skilled workers though, there's a shortage.

Any chance you can get back to working with the airlines in some capacity? Training cabin crew etc? Or look for roles where the training you have had could be valued - health and safety, managing teams catering events maybe?

Most work around is minimum wage work - and for that you are required to have qualifications, skills and be 'fully flexible'. It is preferable that you can be underpaid as a younger person or that you can be bullied into working extra hours for free.

You might need to have your own car/vehicle which will be commandeered at a low rate of expenses to carry out your job.

In short there is a glut of available workers - many of who have lots of experience and qualifications - but these don't matter as much as having no commitments and being willing to work any and all hours that you are wanted (and then the hours being cut when you're not needed)

Are you with an agency? There’s no benefit to them suggesting you for permanent jobs when you’re making them money as a temp. Other than maybe a small transfer fee if your current firm offered you a permanent role.
So please don’t rely in them to find you something. Not all are bad but just a suggestion.

Following as I'm kind of the same, (definitely in age and size 😂)just cannot find anything.
I've been unfortunate in redundancies and restructuring in the past and feel I'm having to apply for base level jobs when my experience and work ethic is so much more!
Went to a pub yesterday and saw a lot of the young staff looking bored, no decent interaction towards diners and on phones! You generally wouldn't get that from older staff but guess they are cheaper to employ 🤷.
One thing to do is look at places you'd like to work and stalk out their websites and Facebook pages for careers, if nothing an enquiring email might work too.
I've started to do that, I'm on the usual indeed/reed/linkedin sites anyway not sure how their algorithm works as they do show odd vacancies when not filtering.

What did you do before you had kids? Did you have a career? If so could you upskill and get back into that?

Most NMW jobs aren't very highly skilled (and I'm not saying they're not valuable at all, but they are the kind of jobs a 16 year old school leaver or person with few qualifications can do) so your experience wouldn't count for as much as it would in a profession.

We need more info to help. What qualifications, skills and experience do you have, and what sort of jobs are you trying for?

Is it possible for you to retrain? I would have thought that if you're doing NMW jobs then they are classed as 'unskilled' and I think your experience wouldn't match up to the rate of pay.