42 and looking to change careers. Any advice or ideas appreciated.

[tinygreengrass]

I am 42 and am mid level Managment in my industry, which I’ve been in for over 25 years. I don’t want to mention the industry, but whenever I tell anyone what I do they say ‘that must be amazing/so fun’! It can be! But it’s also highly pressured and severely underpaid. (I’m on mid £40 salary after 25 years and this is normal). I have lots of transferable skills and was wondering if anyone has retrained or changed career at my age for something more lucrative? Any ideas welcome. If I don’t make the change now, another ten years could have gone by and I’d have missed the boat! I’d love to be on £50-60k by the time I’m 45 but maybe I’m living in cloud cuckoo land!

I have considered teaching (please don’t reel off the negatives as this is something I’ve thought about for some time and have done a lot of research) but I would need to take loans to do this, so the financial side is putting me off. (I have some savings to retrain but not to cover a full year off work) and I’m not sure I’d be able to progress at the rate I’d want to.

Teaching isn't going to be the way you increase your salary in a short period of time. Is promotion out of the question where you are? Can you go to a competitor and jump up the pay scale a bit? Aim for Director level. It's impossible to say what other careers you might be able to transfer in to without more info. Are you HR, an Engineer, an Aaountant etc? What are your transferable skills?

Jesus, teaching? Are you kidding? It'll take you years to get to £50,000 and they'll want your life for that.

Please think of another way.

It's hard to suggest without knowing what sort of skills/experience you have. Can you outline, without being specific about the industry? There's bound to be things like project management/customer experience/people management depending on what you currently do that might be transferable skills

Thanks. I’ve skills in project management, stake holder management, communications. Lots of transferable skills, but not niche like accounting, engineering, medicine etc! I guess if I said I did media studies at Uni many moons ago, that might help?! Thanks for all your replies x

Project management is always useful - how about marketing or digital transformation? I've worked in both fields and there were usually project managers, sometimes many of them. For digital you'd need to train in the particular methodologies used I think - agile, Scrum, I'm sure there are more - and get to know the lingo. Or what about local authorities, or big property firms? Expect they have project managers too.

PS can't help wondering if you work in book publishing - I did, years ago. Worked for a very well regarded company, but extremely high pressure and got paid next to nothing. Did it for a few years, then side stepped. Not expecting you to answer, just expressing solidarity if that's the case :)