If you earn over £60k, what do you do?

[eunia]

I’m a midwife and truly fed up. It’s my passion, but too much stress for nowhere near enough pay.

I would like to significantly increase my earning potential. I wouldn’t mind retraining, or doing something somewhat related.

It needs to be something I can do part time (e.g. 4 days a week or similar) as I’m a single parent.

I wouldn’t even mind being self employed.

Please help!

Nearly… but a little way to go. Ex headteacher and now LA Education Adviser (32 years of unbroken service)

Highly recommend initially considering being a private midwife/doula/maternity nanny…once you’ve built up good reputation you’ll easily earn well and get lots of referrals. Also training as a sleep consultant and helping new parents learn the ropes. I paid £1500 to a sleep consultant who spent 3 nights here. And I had an amazing maternity nanny who was £20/hr

You need to think about how you can take what you do and love (midwifery) and capitalise upon that knowledge and experience to maybe offer a private / exclusive service / consultancy to mums etc etc

you might be able to find a way of working fewer days but setting up your own business invariably requires some effort and input. You generally work towards part time rather than start part time.

I’m a teacher and would about 70k full time - I do 4 days a week

Drop of a hat emergency carers and those offering bridging placements for high risk teens in my area can earn around £1000/£1200 a week easily.

Operational management £60k+ and its taken me 15 years and lots of sector hopping along the way. It's a very diverse and transferable skill set which lends itself well to lots of industries.

I’d do this if I was in OP’s shoes.
Or Aus/ NZ?

@eunia the good news is you are still very young and, being a parent already, your living costs are likely to reduce over time. You’re doing the hard yards now if you have a very young child.

Essentially, I’d say you need to get away from frontline healthcare roles in the NHS.

Baby sleep consultants with good business nous, post-birth doulas/ multiples specialist post-birth helpers, and really posh Nannies, could command more than NHS midwives.

You could also consider moving into the private healthcare sector depending on where you are. Surely the likes of Portland wing employ midwives and probably are able to treat them better than NHS funded services?

if you want to move out of your field entirely and are very salary focused then yes, finance- and business- adjacent jobs are the way to go. Accountancy, law, insurance, trading, wheeling-and dealing type roles. However, they can be insecure, not family friendly and misogynistic.

Left field choice if you live somewhere urban and have a good business sense and are good with people plus not technically incompetent: a regulated trade like heating engineer or electrician. I’ve got family members doing that and after 10 years they are easily netting £90k. The hours can be fairly long but it’s not stressful in the least and they control their own workload.

Also to answer your actual question (sorry). I am earning around £65k as a single parent in London; I’m on my knees, it’s not good. I hit a ceiling a while ago, so, like you say, definitely aim for something where there is no cap on your earnings: what seems good when you’re younger quickly deflates and shrinks to nothing when you’re middle aged.

65k as a single parent is not much above the take home equivant of two full time working parents earning minimum wage. It was only when I realised that, that I clocked why I was always on the bones of my arse. Either that, or strenuously pursue finding someone to share your life and costs with. Two earner households are streets ahead.

I would leave the UK and work elsewhere… I am a RN and earn £65000 plus unsocial hrs x

I'm sorry that your management is rubbish they definitely should be following minimum breaks and safety. Thankfully that's not my experience of midwives in North Scotland.

Have you looked at private hospitals? That would be the easiest route to a higher salary.

Civil service as others have mentioned are possible but you do start way below, I have a niche field within the civil service there are subsets which get money ontop of base rate.

@eunia please do an AMA about midwifery

There's a whole industry around pregnancy, baby, lactation & postpartum care - could you do NCT classes or set up as a doula/breastfeeding expert? I imagine it'd be lower stress.

You could drop some hours as a midwife and do it on the side until you earn enough to stop midwifery completely. If you build up a good reputation I imagine you'd easily exceed £60k

Before I had a health catastrophe that put everything on hold I was about to make the move to a £60k+ (FTE) role. I'd have remained part time and about 50% WFH. I'm a management accountant with several years experience.

You just need to have good maths and English to start studying the CIMA qualification, and some companies may take you on as a junior/accounts assistant and pay for your studies.

Head of IT at a charity, on £70k. 30+years experience, work quite long but regular hours

These are the thoughts that kept me in a job that gave me severe anxiety, sleepless nights and had me crying throughout the day. It's not worth it. The NHS is not a nice place to work.

@EilishMcCandlish what part in the pharmaceutical industry? Im assuming not a pharmacist

Engineer - quite a senior one.

FT would be about £75k, but I recently switched to PT. The job doesn't fit in PT hours though: the difference is more like 34h/week instead of 40-45h/week.

I work in new product development. Not a pharmacist.
Anyone with a professional medical allied discipline (nurse, doctor, midwife, pharmacist, chemistry, vet, vet nurse etc...) would be able to make the hop into industry. Sales and marketing roles are often a good starting point.

train driver

Marketing consultant, 110k. Very flexible, work from home, pretty much choose my hours. 20 years plus a degree in business and marketing and post grad diploma and continuous training.
Would say you can get into it from any age, and build up to 75k in around 5 years but would need to put hours in at the start of the journey and likely be hybrid office based.
I can only be this flexible becuase I have the experience people want to pay for and are willing to be flexible for.

@eunia in my friendship group, those at that salary are :

Accountant
Doctor
Dentist
Optometrist
PA in financial services
High finance

In your place id probably do some sort of finance qualification like ACCA then try and get a junior role in financial services. All the rest would take too much extra study. PA role is good though working in financial services makes a huge difference in pay.

So basically this is my job, project manager in financial services, regional office for one of the big dogs.

Started on £35k, 8 years later on £90k so progression is good. Worked hard for several promotions, could probably drop to 4 days if I wanted but some periods are exceptionally busy and sometimes stressful so not sure I’d want to.

I’m a Band 8c Nurse Prescriber, primary care and earn more than that for part time hours.I also work self employed doing similar. Love my job, lots of variety and if I work full time my take home is over 100 k per year.

@eunia that’s sad about midwifery because when I did 20 months nurse training in late 80s ( gave up in end due to divorce and shifts ) midwifery was by far my favourite placement along with female surgical - and I would have been tempted to do midwifery at that point if life hadn’t gone tits up - it was hard going though , women quite rightly have high expectations at that point of life of good care and it was hard to keep the care even and consistently high given that it’s quite random how many ladies and babies you are dealing with at any point - not unlike A&E in that respect - which I totally hated.