Anyone in a job paying £50K+ working 40 h per week or less?

[notnearlythereyet]

Inspired by the work vs. life balance thread.

I have a Masters degree and five additional qualifications (all related to my profession and three of them postgraduate). I am on around £50 K and should be at a place in my career when I am reaping the benefits of my studies and 10 years of experience. Instead, I work 50-60 hours per week, suffer from work-related stress and anxiety and dream about retiring, although I love my profession and feel like I make a difference (full disclosure: I work in a school but work through around half of my holidays).

If you have a career related to your studies/experience, you are happy and have a good work-life balance (e.g. working 40 h/week) and earn £50K+, what is your job? I struggle to think of a career where you can earn a decent living and not be pushed to work more than 8h/day. I would like to advise my daughter and students on career choices that won’t ‘break’ them AND provide a good living, because I feel I failed to see the realities of the career path I chose.

Also-are you in a career that you feel ‘failed’ yyou in providing the work-life balance you hoped for, I would love to hear about it too.

£70k+, civil service, have a law degree but not a lawyer. 37 hour week, v small amount of travel that is optional.

I’d be stuffed if I lost my job though. I’d be temping in an office as I’m not qualified in anything but being a civil servant.

Get a qualification.

I'm a lawyer working a 4 day week (28 hours) for about £100k. Actually I usually work closer to 35 hours a week but rarely 40 hours or more. I worked very long hours for years though.

R&D in a big company. i earn more tha £50000. official hours are 37.5 plus commute (due to different location at least 10 hours a week). Working more hours is expected if a deadline is close etc,but overall good work - life balance. Getting there was hatd though, 70-80 hours a week for the first 10 years or so, then it goes down. Most of us had their first child mid 30s, earlier is only possible with a stay at home parent or grandparents looking after kids daily.

My boss’ boss earns £55-65k in local authority middle management. It’s a 35hr week with flexitime good pension etc. It takes c15 years experience to get there. She manages 10 managers who manage a handful of employees each. She doesn’t seem stressed and her job doesn’t seem hard- no travel, mostly desk/ meetings.

Add on: parttime is oy possible under very specific circumstances (a colleagues husband is terminally ill for example), and maternity leave longer than 6 months is a really, really bad idea (the field moves insanely fast - to stay in touch,you basically need to work)

£85k for 9-5.30 with good work life balance. Work in finance/economics/policy (related to my PhD) and have been working for 10 years.

Not uncommon in my industry to get to six figures but you need to pick your workplace carefully in terms of hours.

There seems to be a common thread of many of here jobs having high entrance hurdles. Either very difficult exams, long training, crazy hours the first ten years, niche skills, or a mix of those.

In effect, these are the modern equivalent of Guilds - you have to do a long apprenticeship, entry numbers are limited and thus demand and wages can be controlled.

Grade 6 civil servant with a lot of specialist skills pay. I work 37 hours a week with full flexi. Incredibly stressful, lots of (paid) travel and some on call work.

I should also point out that I usually work 8 until 7, though I could get away like my colleagues do, with working less. But I think my doing so is one reason why I have been promoted above people older than me (and am by far the youngest at my level).

I too am aware that I am very lucky.

60K ish, I work for myself and my weeks work can vary from 10 hrs to 40+ hrs depending on my project load. It's taken a few years of learning my limits and when to say no I cannot do this by that time/date ( my customers have been brilliant so far). I've found a comfortable work life balance. I'm mid 40's also have post doc qualifications.

I earned a little north of this in my previous career: copywriting for advertising and marketing agencies.

It was a good shout for me because I'm good with words, creative and can absorb information quickly. I also liked agency environments. They can be laid-back, fun and carry a sense of team spirit (caveat: not all of them).

Getting into it is competitive. I had a good degree in English from a decent university, and I had to demonstrate keenness and creativity. It wasn't unusual to be up against 70 or 80 people for a job, although I discovered later that 80% of these tended to be chancers. (A lot of people think they can write copy. A lot of people are wrong.)

Sometimes I'd work a 30-hour week (there was flexibility around coming and going; as long as the work got done no one really cared) and sometimes it'd be 50-odd, which still wasn't bad compared to other sectors. When agencies pitched for business we'd do the occasional small-hours finish or even an all-nighter, but that was rare.

Agency copywriting jobs tend to be concentrated in larger cities. In the UK, most of the industry is in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds and Newcastle, although there are smaller agencies all over the place. There are opportunities worldwide, of course. Especially in Europe, the US (New York and Chicago particularly), Singapore, Dubai, Sydney and Melbourne, and Hong Kong.

I've moved out of that career now, mainly because I'd reached the level I wanted to get to and had become bored. I didn't want to get into the management level. I retrained in something more outdoorsy and physical. Now I mainly do that, with a bit of freelance copywriting on the side. These days I earn a little less than 50k, but I am more fulfilled (not to mention physically fitter).

The people I know who are most fulfilled by their work are the ones who have some agency over their work lives. Some of them earn less than 20k a year, but because they are respected at work and have a way of making their voice heard, the job carries a sense of fulfilment.

Businesses that treat their people like batteries to be drained or used up, at any salary level, are the ones to avoid. It's a lack of control and/or respect that crushes people, not (necessarily) a low salary.

Yes, Hyper has it right. I am also a lawyer who earns a fair bit. I have had some years of a lot of work but I now am based at home and can choose my hours. The original poster is a teacher. For 200 years int he UK we have known that is you want a lot of money you don't choose teaching as a job so the mistake if she wants money was in that choice originally and if her parents or school said go into teaching you get very high pay for short hours she was utterly conned.

If something is hard to get into then simple economics means that the pay will be better. I earn £xxx per hour and my perfectly happy not interesting in money Ocado van driving son presumably about £10 an hour. Just about anyone with a driving licence can drive an Ocado van. Not that many people can do what I do.

My doctor sibling earns quite a lot too but again that comes from being in a sense top of the tree and being prepared to do long hours at least for some periods.

I always call it "jam tomorrow" - if you put off the going out with friends so you get the best exam results around and then you work very hard in the first years of your job (and very very importantly choose specifically high paid work which most people cannot do ) you can then slacken off later and have a fairly nice life.

The teacher in the origuinal post dreams of retiring. I get up every day and am interested in the work I have to do. I work for myself and I would like to die at this desk going what I love. I was scanning my 1978 diary yesterday or parts of it when I was applying for university to read law and thinking 40 years later this is still incredibly interesting and different every day and how lucky I was with that initial career choice. The diary is interesting - the Head of our school whom I went to see specifically to talk about Oxbridge (no one had ever been there from my school until my younger sibling tried and got in) said it was too hard and put me off. She also said I was disqualified because I was a year yhoung at school (I went to university aged 17 in England) .

I then wanted to do music O level as an extra subject in the sixth form (I had 4 grade 8 musics including theory) and she said no unless I taught myself and so I had to (and I did and got the top grade). Thirdly I wanted to take 3 x 3 hour entrance scholarship exams to try to win one for my university and she tried to put me off that too. I insisted and I sat the papers the next January and won the scholarship. I did this secretly from my parents and then the school called them and told them so that wasn't because of parental pressure although I am sure they were very proud of me for getting it and I am sure having parents who encouraged us academically helped a lot. (one was a teacher and the other a doctor (consultant)).

Fourthly she tried to put me off law - she said too many people were going into law and it was hard to get jobs and other people were saying at school it was so boring. Hardly anyone went to university from my year at school. I had not remembered until last night just how much discouragement there had been. I was very lucky to make it through to this rather lovely life now.

Housing development project manager. 35 hrs a week and flexi time. 38 days hol. 60k plus.

DH is a specialist working 7am-3.30pm. He earns 50k + bonuses. He's just 52, retires in 3 years. He likes his job, hates the hassles and he's at the point where if redundancy was offered tomorrow he would take it.

I had not remembered until last night just how much discouragement there had been. I was very lucky to make it through to this rather lovely life now.

I went to a really crap northern comp where I was actually laughed at by the ‘careers’ person for saying I wanted to go to university. There was no history of it in the family and while my family were supportive they had no practical experience to help me make informed choices, and the school had no ability or desire to.
I never had any problem with the intellectual side of it, but the sheer difference in the people I met at university was an eye opener. Middle class, well off families who understood the system, and expected their children to go. It was a different world.
I chose science to study and did a PhD as well, because I was passionate about it but if I was advising a child now I would be talking to them more about networking, money, professional qualifications etc, back then there was no internet so it was very difficult for a kid like me to truly be exposed to the right information. I certainly made choices I wouldn’t repeat.

I think this is a key issue in discussing social mobility. There must be a lot of very smart kids out there whose talent isn’t realised fully because they just don’t have the exposure to this world of work. The internet makes things better but the social expectations are still there (not for the likes of us, etc.)

I'm a deputy manager in care. Contracted to 40 hours a week but haven't done less than 50. It's hard as I'm a single parent. Only make 21k though! But I love it and it's my first management job and I'll be getting a promotion and pay rise next year.

I’m on 45k but cross 50k with bonus. I work 35 hours a week and love it!

You put in a lot of work up front at uni and then in your 20s working your way up but now I'm in my mid 30s expecting DC2 I'm very very glad I chose law as a career.

This reflects my feelings too. I had a whole year off when I had DC1 and it didn't seem to affect me really as I was still very qualified. I had built up a lot of credit as a really hard worker and very trustworthy and so when I returned I was able to negotiate a good working pattern with no change to my pay. Then I got very lucky because my boss left when I'd been back about a year and I was able to take over but keep my flexible working.

I feel extremely fortunate and also glad I pulled the all nighters in my 20s as it's left me in a good position now. My vague plan is to do this for another couple of years and then start doing temp contracts only so I can hopefully be around more in the afternoon for homework helping and things once DS is at school.

Hyper, that's interesting. I always like to know how people end up how they do. I saw in my 1978 diary that I also wanted to be a writer. I did type 4 50,000 word books by the way in my teens which I think is quite an achievement but all publishers rejected them (they weren't any good) although I did win some money in writing competitions and opened a second secret bank account - I do not know why I wanted all these secrets from my parents when I was 16 - it was probably about wanting independence and deciding what happened when). I wrote in the diary that I would not do writing as it did not pay as much as law and for the things I wanted in my life I needed the higher salary. That would be partly home influence as the school suggested librarian or probation officer or teacher as jobs. My grandfather left school at 12 but his older brother managed to qualify as a solicitor in Leeds and that did mean he got more money (although he was certainily not rich) so there would have been that family understanding that a good education and a profession was one route out of the coal mines.

My dh does. Developer.

I work in publishing and ear than amount working 37.5h a week but I have 15 years experience.

I've just left a job that paid like that.

60+ hours a week and tonnes of travel. It nearly broke me.

I'm in Scotland, so not SE or anything....... my very wise neighbour and my counsellor both advised me to look to see what I needed to earn, rather than what I could.

It's a hard nut to swallow when I've worked so hard to get to where I am, but it was no life. I am here for DH and DD now and that's so important to me. I am studying and will look for something part time so I can continue this.

£85K pa plus £30k bonus for 37.5 hours a week. Totally flexible, WFH one day a week. Sometimes stay an hour late or so but not that often. I'm MD of a niche PR agency and boy did I put in the hours when I started. Lots of travel, working through the night etc. But I was bloody good at my job and as I've progressed I've built up a very unique set of skills in a niche sector and am actually looking to move as I am definitely underpaid.

Husband is an engineer and on £100k and works 40h per week, never does overtime.

Deputy Director of Finance, public sector. 37.5hr week but need to be flexible, I do work evenings occasionally but I usually get the time back. £77k, this is the lower end of the salary band, you could earn up to roughly £100k, more in London

£130,000 a year here.

Technically on duty 144 hours a week (yeah...) but 72 of those are night on-call and 20 more are day on-call (ie, I need to be available, but I'm not actually working).

However the job pays food, board and expenses so every penny goes into savings. The idea is to work 8 years and then live off the investments.

So quite the opposite of having any work-life balance right now, but the reward will be complete life balance when the job is over.

I'm 26 and have no qualifications above A-levels

Sorry, fell asleep.
I'm a Governess