Posting for inspiration on my next life stage....(name changed)
Life so far:
0-10 Childhood (ambitions: to be a palaeontologist, to run a cattery from a thatched cottage)
11-21 Get as many qualifications as possible and go to a top university - ACHIEVED (2 masters inc one from Oxbridge, in museums/archaeology/anthropology)
22-32 Enter very competitive museum world, work way up, become Curator of my own museum(s) - ACHIEVED
33-40 Have a baby, whilst continuing to run my museum(s) part-time. - ACHIEVED
I then left employment and spent two years home educating my child with school trauma whilst doing lots of ASD diagnosis, EHCP (etc etc) paperwork. Child is now back at school and in a few months will hopefully be settled enough that I will not be required to take lots of sudden days off at no notice anymore. Child will no longer be able to attend breakfast/afterschool clubs etc so I will only really be available 9am-3pm on weekdays - I have a husband who would be able to do drop-offs, but is currently our sole income (and works in a field that is a lot better paid than museums!) so whilst he could probably also physically do a collection once a week by using wfh/flexi-time we do not want to start dropping his days etc at this point.
What should I do for work now?
I will continue to try to keep in touch with the museum world and apply for anything that seems to fit which comes up in our area, but those posts are few and far between so I cannot just return to being a Curator or even any kind of mid-level post immediately, or possibly for several years. I'd still quite like to work in 'heritage' in general but the same issues apply. One of my masters involved genetics and I had a genetics lab based job for a short time, but that was 20 years ago and so basically a different field to now, so not really a goer anymore without further study.
I'm also (late diagnosed) autistic, and while I have had no problems giving talks, managing volunteers and even running hobby clubs for children and adults (and have successfully worked in customer facing retail), I would prefer not to have a job that is primarily based on either soft-skill "people skills", making lots of telephone calls or organising a rota (the last just because it was my least favourite part of Curatoring, so if I can drop it now that would be great!).