Am I doomed to have no career?

[OwlInTheMoss]

Does anyone have any suggestions of what I could do to earn some money?! I feel pretty useless right now.

I am in my 40s with 2 kids. Ideally I need to work flexible, part time hours to fit around the family's needs including one child with ASD who often needs a lot of my time. Working from home would be perfect.

I work hard and am friendly and learn quickly. I like doing jobs that feel like they make a positive difference to the world in some way. I'm interested in plants and literature and art and people and making things.

I did well academically and I have a language degree from a good uni, but don't speak any language well enough to use for work.

Pre-kids I did support worker type roles, but these are too emotionally heavy for me now.
I did admin jobs as a student which was ok, though my knowledge is out of date.

The last few years I've been working as a gardener, which I absolutely love, but I've done something painful to my back, am currently off work, and I just don't know that this is going to be a suitable career option in the long term.

I don't need or want a high-flying career and DH earns enough to carry most of the financial load, but I definitely want to be contributing.

Feels like I am wafting about getting nowhere and constantly going back to the drawing board.

Good point about jobs not always stating they are potentially wfh, that's worth bearing in mind.

@elmooie I am really tickled by the idea of selling tiny edible flowers!

Defra or Forestry Commission - a lot of civil
service jobs are work from home or hybrid / part time.

If you love the gardening are you well enough to keep one or two jobs on for a day a week and then find something else for the rest of the week?

Subtitler - it's what I do. Easy to learn, WFH. Your writing is great - you clearly have good spelling and grammar.

The pay is not huge, but you can boost it with overtime.

There is evening and weekend work, though.

How can you have a language degree but not speak any language well enough to use it for work? 🤔

Round my way there are plenty of (male) gardeners who love using chain saws and diggers to clear out overgrown jungles etc.
But it’s much harder to find one willing to do hand weeding, hoeing, dead heading - the small fiddly jobs.
Could you perhaps partner up with one of the former, to provide follow up maintenance of newly created borders, or weeding for elderly clients?
That way, you would have no heavy digging, groundbreaking, or coping with huge tree stumps and branches, but just focus on the lighter but time consuming stuff?

Get a job as a TA, train in a specialism eg SEMH then leave, set up privately as a colleague of mine has done and is making big money.

@KnickerlessParsons because it was 20 years ago and I've not spoken it since!

@Babdoc yes that's exactly the kind of work I already do 😁. Sadly all the bending around is still too much for my wuss of a back at the moment.

A friend of my son does TEFL online

@OddsBodkin I've never thought about subtitling, that sounds like it could be up my street. How did you get into that? What sort of things do you do subtitles for?

What about fundraising or comms in a charity? You could write grant applications. There’s a shortage of candidates currently so some charities are taking on people with transferable skills and the right attitude to it.

Agree with comments above for civil service. Flexible roles can work from home (may need to go into an office part of working week) but can find part time roles. Lots of parents and carers.

Defra is a good shout definitely. Take a look at civil service jobs and sign up for alerts. Good luck.

Not RTFT and people have suggested garden designer but I often wish there was a service available for basically a garden consultant who would essentially just advise on what plants would work in your garden, what time of year to plant them etc. for people who don’t have huge budgets and want to do the work but don’t really have a clue where to start with plant types etc! Almost like one of those clothes stylists who do a body type analysis / mood board for a couple of hundred quid.

Could you get a part time job in a garden centre? Around here some garden centres are run by groups who support special needs adults so there an extra element to working there on top of being good at gardening. There always seems to be a lovely atmosphere and it meets your need for giving back as well as using your gardening skills and experience with special needs.
OR
Could you do a Teaching English as a Foreign Language Course as you understand how language works. They often have special offers on these courses so keep an eye out. You could then set up as a tutor online teaching people in a different time zone while your dc are in school. To give back maybe you could volunteer as a language coach with new refugees one morning a week. If for example they spoke French your language knowledge could be helpful even if you are a bit rusty.
If you managed to get a Civil Service job the fact that you have a degree will help in the process even if you feel you have forgotten everything.

No? What an utterly bizarre thing to think. I don’t know anyone who has sought work like this. You could not staff a hospital or any number of other essential services if this was what everyone whose family mattered to them wanted.

I’d look to the local uni OP, ours has a lot of non-academic work that is quite flexible.

Set up as a Virtual Assistant and do admin BUT specialise in working with companies that align with your values or you’re really interested in.

specialist VAs can earn £25+ an hour working flexibly. There are plenty of people who help you get set up. Message me if you want intros.

I would absolutely love to do this! I am not sure whether there's enough of a market but it's something I can look into. What I like is that it would build on my existing skills and knowledge rather than starting from scratch. And I would still be in control of hours and workload.

I've wondered before about doing something like garden mentoring, so teaching practical skills in the customer's own garden, but again it's whether I could get enough interest. With garden maintenance you only need a few regular customers but these other things would need a lot of ongoing effort put into advertising and finding customers.

You said you don’t speak another language well enough, but what about in writing? Is there some sort of freelance translation work you could get into?

Also what about something like proofreading?

The last few years I've been working as a gardener, which I absolutely love, but I've done something painful to my back, am currently off work, and I just don't know that this is going to be a suitable career option in the long term.

OP. You already have your own successful business and a client base. You need to employ labour and scale up.

Get onto some business courses in your local enterprise centre (or equivalent) and start thinking about how you can grow (!) your business.

You will be the face of the business and the client contact. Do the admin and finances. Someone else will do the heavy lifting.

You can incorporate the garden design element as you will have more desk time when you’re off the tools.

This is an opportunity for you.

Could you set up a forest school?

My honest feeling is that you're going to find it quite hard to find something to meet that list of requirements. Flexible part-time working that isn't "emotionally heavy" is something people build careers for years before being considered for. The sort of flexibility you want is associated with more senior roles in my experience.

I wonder if something self employed might work for you? You still wouldn't be full flexible, but might be workable.

I think you have to accept that, if you want to be paid, there will be an impact in your life becoming less convenient.

If you have a language degree, could you not refresh your skills and run basic conversation classes? You could run a couple of groups weekly during the day for school mums, pensioners, other flexi-workers. It would pay reasonably well. Small groups each paying £10ph pp, you could earn £120 per session with a group of six, (you'd spend the same amount of time planning at first but after a couple of terms you'd have all your teaching resources set up). And you could do individual tutoring for £25-45ph. Teaching people holiday or business lnaguage skills is a really valuable talent.

You could also run gardening classes,half day or one day workshops. Create a course called something like: 'how to plant a garden on a budget' or 'how to encourage wildlife to your garden' and teach skills like growing from seed/potting on, dividing plants, pruning, interplanting, building bug hotels etc, green ways to create paths, terraces etc. I'd go to a block of classes like that. I'd love that!

You sound like you have people skills, if you have tended towards support work. That makes for a good adult workshop leader.

Do you like writing? Do you have (can you develop) a niche interest? Thinking perhaps you could start a gardening blog and try to monetise it. Could be working on a book in the background?

Podiatry, you can work from home is you have a spare downstairs room. I work in the NHS now but when I did private podiatry I earned about £5 a month.