Can I ask you about your career path?

[Tailypo]

For no reason other than interest (and extreme nosiness ), AIBU to ask you all about your career paths?

Would you mind just providing a bit of info about your first steps into work after secondary school or university, and your career from then on please?

I'm stuck in a bit of a careers rut right now ( :( ) and would love to feel inspired :)

I'd love to keep my options as open as possible, so I'm really interested in my next career move as well as in what I could be (potentially!) involved in later on in a career too.

Thanks!

I wanted to be a physical training instructor ( PTI) in the navy and did kind of a bridging course at college.
Ended up being a dental nurse for 9 years which I loved.
Had a career break while boys were little and now I have a great job playing with play dough and glitter. 😃 Mostly school hours which is a bonus

(keep in mind I am a late starter career wise, :) )

Left school & went nursing, but fell in love & then husband to be disliked my shift work/rostered duties & study commitments - so I gave it up for love. Sad. Went on to various factory jobs (animal ear tags, sewing factories x 2 or 3) until I left work to have 1st child, with now ex-H.
Then for about 10-14 years did seasonal work (fruit picking; some sales work like Avon etc) around kids - plus we lived rurally. Oops, had remarried by then with 2 more kidlets.
Did a business course in town to upskill myself, loved it & so enrolled in extramural studies then I moved to a larger town & completed a business degree in accountancy. Have now been fully qualified for about 12 yrs & work nearby in a large corporate office. Am part-time now which is nice with only about 6 more yrs before I hope to retire. Way different to what I ever thought I would be doing when I first left home to go nursing. :)

I have a BA in business, a BEng in Software Engineering and an MSc in Computer Science. Currently taking an MBA.

I started out wanting to go into hospitality management and actually did work in the field for a few years before realising it wasn't intellectually challenging for me and going on to re-train in IT.

I then joined a start-up as a programmer after finishing but got bored with programming, so I let myself be poached by a leading consulting firm, where I joined as a business analyst.

I've been crawling up the corporate ladder ever since and now do mostly management and sales stuff, though I still enjoyoperative BA work and will jump at the opportunity whenever it presents itself for a bit of a challenge.

I really love what I do and, if I may say so, I'm bloody good at it, too. Somewhat disquietingly, maybe, my favourite part of my job is managing crises of all kinds. It combines the problem solving challenges of BA work with the pressure and responsibility of management and you're normally operating under extreme time restrictions. I usually have a blast when everyone else is one heartbeat away from a panic attack.

Law with French degree
Postgraduate bar vocational course
Internship in the European Commission and work for a law firm in Brussels
Back to the UK to do barrister apprenticeship (pupillage)
Move from the independent Bar to working in a law firm
Move firm a couple of times
Become a partner in a law firm in late 30s
Now pondering my next step.

I went to Uni to do a teacher training degree however at the start of 3rd year (of 4) I became seriously ill and had to leave. Fast forward a couple of years, got a place to finish my degree and got pregnant with DC1!

Got a job in a local company, started in the call centre worked my way up to manger and then made a sideways move to an area I found more interesting.

Worked hard and made a name for being reliable and someone who 'got stuff done', promoted a couple of times and after a couple of years a great opportunity came up to work on an acquisition. Put myself forward and 2 years on I'm helping oversee the biggest programme our organisation has ever done.

In short I started as a temp and 20 years on I've worked hard, put myself forward for opportunities and made a name for myself. It's an area I've got no qualifications in and didn't ever expect to end up in. I've been lucky to be in the right place at the right time and the company was taken over by a global organisation which provided more opportunities.

Chemistry Degree
Worked in academic research for a few years
Moved to hi tech sales - great earnings, lots of travel including international.

Gave up work to become a SAHM for 8 years
Became self employed now work 15 hours a week from home and earn as much as I did in my well paid sales roles.

Really interesting to read everyone's journey.
I'll add mine...
Left school mid way through a-levels went to work full time in Debenhams realised very quickly that retail work was not for me!
I went back to college to do an access to uni course and worked evenings in a coffee shop then did a degree in Health Studies- and was promoted to assistant manager at the coffee shop.
After I graduated I took a very low paid assistant role in public health dept- I worked like mad did all my work so I could help more senior people with theirs got promoted again and finally to senior analyst level- doing disease statistics. It was a very technical and quite well paid role but not something that appealed to me so when much office relocated while I was expecting my dc2 I took redundancy to enable to me be a sahm for a while.
That was 2 years ago and since then I've had a lovely time with my 2 dc (although I will say it's been the most demanding job I've ever had!) and I've been trying to do things to get me where I would like to so volunteering for a couple charities and have become a local councillor- I'm starting an MA hopefully in Sept in Public Policy and Management hopefully if I am able to complete that and get enough work experience when I do return to work it can be in a strategic or leadership type role for a charity.

I love how some people have had really diverse career changes - Wombat you sound so interesting!

I really like my job (very technical, involves lots of giving advice and 'positions' to senior people to help them make decisions). I love that I have a great degree of flexibility now - I work from home and deadlines permitting, can take hours here and there as long as my delivery isn't compromised. That's offset by manic times when I'll have to do 14 hour days including weekends - swings and roundabouts.

But I don't want to do this forever. It's well paid so it will hopefully get us through a house move, with another 10/15 years or so to pay off the mortgage and stash as much as I can afford into a pension. At which point I would love to take my passion for gardening and flowers and do something with that. I'm comfortable with the fact that I'll need to keep working at least PT probably into my 70s (sadly my pension isn't THAT good - I started saving far too late really) - and to be honest I like working. It gives me a sense of purpose and structure to my day.

The best advice I can give to someone who wants to work their way up or who is changing direction is to have a very clear goal/plan. It doesn't matter if you don't know what the job itself should look like - my plan was that I just needed to earn more money so I could pay off debts!

Get your head down, be organised, reliable and deliver good quality work - because you can go a long way by just getting the job done efficiently and with the minimum of fuss. Don't be scared to move organisations if your current firm doesn't recognise or reward what you do. I stayed with my first firm for 8 years - and it was a mistake. I should've left long before that - the flip side to being a safe pair of hands is that it is tempting for a manager to want to keep you in place and not promote you because you do a good job for them. Most of all, put your big girl pants on and don't be afraid to tell people what you want. It's common for women to not be as good at negotiating their own T&C ('pushy', 'ballbreaker') - all bollocks. If you want a promotion then tell your manager and ask them what you need to do to make it happen - set a timescale and if you deliver and the firm don't reward you then be prepared to move on. And negotiate HARD when it comes to salary. I was being paid £20k less than a male colleague for doing exactly the same job.

The best advice I can give to someone who wants to work their way up or who is changing direction is to have a very clear goal/plan.

It didn't work for me doing things that way.

Very few big events in my life could have been planned.

For me it was simply taking a leap of faith and having a positive outlook.

Cailleach I think you have misunderstood what I said. I didn't even know what industry I wanted to work in, let alone what I wanted to do. My goal was that I wanted to earn more - and it went from there. By the sounds of it yours was that you wanted to change something and you needed to have faith and take a chance - that's still a goal

Training contract with big 4 to do ACA

For those of us whose first language is English?

Landsend the 'big 4' are a group of accountancy firms or professional services firms (Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG).

ACCA is the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and you can take a set of exams to join them :)

Degree in law, then did the Bar, but never practised, as I had started working in the charity sector and carried on in that line. Worked in various charity organisations in Europe and Africa for nearly 10 years. Stopped to do a Masters, got pregnant and needed a change of plan.

Moved into a university administration/management role and have been doing that for nearly 10 years. It draws on my legal background, is interesting, and I earn a bit over £32k for a 9-5 role, so happy enough for now. Doing part-time PhD related to my old (charity) area of work. Interested in getting back to that area in due course, but realistically will have to wait another decade till DD grown up (single parent, can't travel, want to do the kind of job that requires it).

A lot of career "path" is really about chance, ime.

Hi biblio - thanks for posting :) could I ask you how you got into the charity work please? I'm really interested in jobs in the public sector or in charities, and would be really interested to hear about how you got into that kind of work.

I got ok results at school and went to uni to study an environmental science degree. I decided quite early on that I definitely wouldn't end up working in this field but it was a reasonably interesting degree.

Took a year off after to do a bit of travelling and some office temp work then went back to uni to do a postgraduate degree in IT systems management which I really enjoyed and without the 'distractions' I had during my undergraduate degree I ended up with a distinction. Somehow ended up on the graduate programme of a big bank (I just applied to a lot of programmes) and got offered a job there. To this day I still don't know how I managed it - I didn't have a clue about banking but am quite a friendly, easy to get along with type person which I think saw me through the interviews!

Spent the next 12 years in said bank doing various relationship roles and had quite a good time travelling around etc before the crash in 2008. Then I moved to another big bank to do something similar and now I'm still in that bank but doing more project management work. It's not perfect and I'm still looking for the ideal role for me but I earn a decent wage in a middle management job and I have a lot of flexibility in my working patterns which suits my life right now. Actually on mat leave at the moment with baby number 2.

Left school with 3 'o' levels and a handful of typing qualifications, went straight into office work at 16. Left when the company folded and went into retail for a while. Returned to office work and followed a more structured career path, finally leaving after 15 years to have kids - by this time I had been a Board level assistant for 5 years. During this period I also studied for a degree part time, graduating in 2003.

I'm now back at work part-time, working as office manager in the business my husband owns. Role is broad as I'm the only admin person. I'm responsible for the accounts, hr, sales admin, etc, etc.

I sometimes wish I'd used my degree, but I am happy in the knowledge that I achieved it, when I'd been pretty much written off by teachers at my school.

Hi everyone, just bumping this again if that's okay :)

Maths degree at top UK university.
GAP year and summers working for company A doing job X
Job on graduation for company B doing same job X
Moved around within company B for 20 years ago
Adopted and stopped work to become SAHM.

Academic at school, passable at uni. Unsure what I wanted to do and trained as a primary school teacher (PGCE). It never felt right, although I was quite good at it and so I walked out on that and now working my way up through retail management, which I rather fell in to.

Sometimes I hate it, mostly I love it although I'd like my weekends back. I could try grad entry based on my current experience or go up one more level, get more of a transferable office skill set and capable role and then see what I can do outside the industry (I'd like to be a PA :) ).

My short career is now over (had a child and relocated to an area where the very small market is oversaturated) but I got good gcses, 2 shit a levels, dropped out of uni then did seasonal work for a few years before falling into nannying. Got my level 3 studying from home, worked for some horrible people but mostly lovely normal people over 7 years. Relocated in September last year whilst pregnant with my first. Now I'm starting to study for four a levels which I am planning to take in 2019 (maths, biology, chemistry and physics) and then probably do a degree, though I'm not sure which path to take yet but I just want to enjoy studying and having a challenge so I'll see where my a levels lead me.

10 GCSEs and 3 A-levels then went to University to study law. Worked in a pub then a supermarket whist studying. I didn't apply for any training contracts because I was burned out with education at that point. After I graduated in got my first full time job in a civil service call centre and inadvertently ended up as a manager. I always enjoyed any of the legalistic aspects of the civil service role and applied to law school to do the LPC on a whim.

Worked full time and did the LPC part time in the evenings. Got a training contract in the first year so had a job to go to. Paralegalled for a year before it started then qualified into my training firm. Bounced around a few departments trying to avoid the next sector to be hit by changes to industry and ended up sick with the stress of the job. Now I work in house and love it. I'm not qualified for anything other than law so I found a way to do it that doesn't mean I am miserable.

Left school at 18 with a handful of rubbish highers
Worked as a dental nurse for 4 years, had my son at 19 in the middle but went back full time after mat leave which no one expected.
Decided to go back to education last year at 23, have just completed a year at college doing 4 highers (just waiting on my results!)
I have a conditional offer to start a primary education degree in September.

Left school at 16 with pretty good GCSEs. Spent about 10 years being a secretary/PA which was hard to break out of. Did some academic and vocational qualifications during this time. Moved to London then got a break when I was offered a job with a financial services company as an analyst. Got some more industry-relevant qualifications. Worked for several more banks and financial services companies. Now in a job which I've essentially created within the company.

I think I've done pretty well for someone who was written off by my school as not being clever enough to achieve anything in life.

Bumping :)

Left school after getting 10 GCSEs and 4 A-Levels. I had an offer to study physiotherapy at university but narrowly missed my offer and didn't want to go through clearing.

Started working as a food microbiology laboratory technician, studied for a part-time HNC in Food and Consumer Science and got promoted to food development technologist. After being made redundant due to factory closure, I got a job as a food laboratory manager.

After having my first child, DH and I decided I wouldn't return to work - his hours as a self employed worker meant he would often do 15 hour days and childcare to fit in with that and my job would have taken most of my salary. 3 years later I had DC2.

When DC2 was 1yo, I decided I wanted to retrain and go back towards human sciences/healthcare, so I did an Access course in 2012/13. I graduated from an RG university with a First Class Honours degree in a biomedical science related field last year. Now I am just about to finish my Master of Research in Cancer (with Distinction) at the same university.

My current supervisor is putting in research proposals, naming me as a funded PhD student and the Dean of Post Graduste Studies at the university is impressed with my work and has requested to be my second supervisor. All going good, I hope to begin my PhD studies in the next 6-8 months.

So, hopefully in 4-5 years, I will have a PhD and will begin on the fraught and difficult path that is academia!