Best careers with high wages & job opportunities at this present time?

[Starzinhereyes]

Just out of complete curiousity. Is it still law, medicine etc... Dc are still relatively young & it's too soon to tell where there interests lie... DH is a firm believer that tech is a safe gamble if dc are that way inclined...
Also when I was young business & commerce was always a safe bet...
So in your opinion what careers are paying the most & have the most plentiful employment opportunities after uni?

Did you mean to quote me @Lampzade? I didn’t encourage Law.

@NameChangedForThisFeb21

Did you mean to quote me *@Lampzade*? I didn’t encourage Law.

I know , I just quoted your post because I found it interesting. Sorry

medicine is probably the best bet for good income/pension & work/life balance or tech. Banking & law can pay well but you work, work, work

I know , I just quoted your post because I found it interesting. Sorry

Ah no need to apologise, I was just confused and my last point was hastily written with no detail as to why. I
see you’re encouraging Dentistry and hopefully Accountancy with your DC...definitely good plans!

On a slightly depressing note, wages generally have stagnated since 08 & this will happen again. A young person on 80k in London is going to have a very different lifestyle to someone who's twice their age but earns less due to the cost of living, so I would think carefully about location. Unless you can give significant family help.

@mars2

medicine is probably the best bet for good income/pension & work/life balance or tech. Banking & law can pay well but you work, work, work

You have to work your butt off in Medicine. It's definitely not an easy option. On call, nights, weekends? Not in every speciality of course but it's got to be 20 years of blood, sweat and tears before you start to gain work life balance.

I never said it was easy, but 15 ish yrs on my GP friends have better w/l balance then my friends in law/finance. And looking at older friends/relatives the consultants are still working with a good balance whereas those in banking/law have burnt out.

You have to work your butt off in Medicine. It's definitely not an easy option. On call, nights, weekends? Not in every speciality of course but it's got to be 20 years of blood, sweat and tears before you start to gain work life balance.

Medical school isn’t easy, for sure, but what options are chosen post medical school and foundation training make a huge difference. It’s only 3 years after that to be a GP (and we have almost no full-time GPs locally, they’ve all gone part-time at usually 4 days per week for work life balance and pick extras adhoc for higher pay) but if you wanted to do paeds
for example it’s an extra 10 years post medical school. Most of my friends wanted to start a family around the age of 30 and most of their husbands wanted to be hands on, so they decided to be GPs rather than be hospital based. It’s also important to bear in mind that some Medical specialisms are unlikely to need 24 hour availability either. Working nights and weekends and shift working can happen in many, many jobs - from stacking shelves in supermarkets, to Nursing, working in Utilities or Engineering, or being a Veterinarian. It’s not necessarily something to completely avoid. Going forward I think jobs are even less likely to be 9-5 Monday to Friday with all weekends and public holidays off. I briefly worked in an office for a gas and electric provider back in the mid 00s and 90 % of the building (250 office based employees) were expected to have a 24/7 availability to work and Christmas Day etc were all working days. Excellent prospects and pay though.

Yes none of my GP friends work f/t (a huge plus when having dc). I've belonged to 3 surgeries only 1-2 work f/t in each.

@mars2

Yes none of my GP friends work f/t (a huge plus when having dc). I've belonged to 3 surgeries only 1-2 work f/t in each.

Amongst my group of friends being a GP was not an attractive option, even for a work life balance. You often hear GPs leaving the profession because it's so stressful.

@mars2

Yes none of my GP friends work f/t (a huge plus when having dc). I've belonged to 3 surgeries only 1-2 work f/t in each.

out of interest, are these all women?

I know women consultants with children whose husbands are part time GPs as well as couples who are both GPs. In one instance the woman worked part time & has been shafted when they got divorced after the children left school.

Can’t speak for Mars but with me it’s both women and men. My friends seem to appreciate a child free day mid-week as a couple! They take it in turns to pick up an extra out of hours shift on a Saturday or Sunday once a month and that often means a holiday or job on the house is paid outright. They will all eventually go full-time for a while when the kids are teenagers. To be clear, I’m talking about 3 female friends and their husbands, all GPs.

@skeggycaggy all of them but the men did 4 days where the women are 2-3 days.

I think one is a login

Just interested. DH is a GP, he & the 3 other men at the practise all work 8 sessions a week (which is 40 hours, & gives you 2 half days off a week), one woman works 8 sessions a week, & the other 7 GPs, who are all women, work 4 sessions a week. It's an issue in terms of who is willing or able to take up leadership roles and additional responsibilities. Anyway, getting off topic!

locum!

A session is a half day.

Yes at the surgeries I have used it was only women who did 1-3 days.

In my experience (NHS) part time’ GPs work full time hours and full time GPs work ridiculous hours. They constantly complain of being over worked and under valued.

The thing is, you don’t need to be a GP or in medicine to get that mid week off. Plenty of software jobs you can. It’s not high pay in that not many are going to be 6 figure salary. But if your aim is to be able to work full time, have a flexible workplace and decent salary, it’s an excellent choice. You will be able to find places where you can regularly swap a weekday for a weekend. Or do a half day and shift the afternoon hours to another day. For example, both DH and I are stopping working today at 3pm. I have made up the last 2 hours with working a bit longer this week.

I don’t understand why it isn’t a more suggested option for girls.

@NotGenerationAlpha

The thing is, you don’t need to be a GP or in medicine to get that mid week off. Plenty of software jobs you can. It’s not high pay in that not many are going to be 6 figure salary. But if your aim is to be able to work full time, have a flexible workplace and decent salary, it’s an excellent choice. You will be able to find places where you can regularly swap a weekday for a weekend. Or do a half day and shift the afternoon hours to another day. For example, both DH and I are stopping working today at 3pm. I have made up the last 2 hours with working a bit longer this week.

I don’t understand why it isn’t a more suggested option for girls.

Interesting! Is it hard to get into Software training wise? And is it something you could retrain for later? I’m totally clueless about it (and struggling to cope with my current very hands on SEN job). I’ve no qualifications in this area but previous computer based admin roles and always seem to be able to fix IT problems intuitively. I’m aware there’s so much more to software but I’m just wondering if it would be at all possible to make that sort of switch...

My children all want to be teachers or arts based roles 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️. Entirely musician DH and education based my fault.

This is all very interesting. Many thanks for the replies, I have one dc who is a tech whizz at figuring stuff out & is fascinated with tech ( I think this fascination may be due to her being limited to 30 mins tablet time on sat & Sun!) might be good so to develop this interest...

@Sandgrown1970 IT support will be very tied to shift and team availability and won't be that flexible. You are supporting users who will be there during office (or help desk) opening hours. If it is a business, then you can be on call on a rota system. (For example if Sainsbury website went down on a Saturday night).

Software development and related jobs are engineers who design the system that runs the business. We deliver projects that are either new products or are automation. You only need to match meeting hours with your team. We provide playbooks to operations to triage problems out of hours. It'll be very rare you'll be called out of hours. It can happen if your team did TSB bank data migration and the bank operations! DH is a data scientist and it is even more backend. They aren't tied to business system and so have zero chance to being called out of hours.

There are bootcamps for software and data science. (Data engineer and scientists are especially in demand at the moment). I don't know anyone who came via bootcamp as they tend to be front end website design. (I have never worked for a web company). I'm thinking more about young people, and encouraging girls taking up careers in these areas. There are apprenticeship routes and also traditionally via universities.