What jobs could I do?

[Babyshowercot]

I have 10 years experience working in in house recruitment. Currently on mat leave and cannot bear the idea of going back to it (didn’t like it before but held on as was hoping to get pregnant).

I find it mind numbingly boring but have no experience doing anything else. Open to retraining!

I think we'd need an idea on qualifications, salary expectations etc to comment usefully.

@donttellmehesalive

History degree, London based, salary flexible. Happy to take a pay cut with the view to work back up with experience.

What about HR?

Depending on the job you’ve had you may already have knowledge and experience in some legal aspects of work (contract law, discrimination, etc) plus you’ll have experience in building relationships, which is important in HR…. HR is probably more varied, and it’s quite female dominated so plenty of working mums.

Could you use transferrable skills and sideways step into a different HR role? So, from Recruitment into Learning and Development, or Employee Relations, or Wellbeing / Rewards / Benefits?

Or if you like the 'sales' aspect of recruitment, another sales role, like Sales & Marketing, or an Estate Agent etc.

@JustJamie5 I’d definitely be interested in that - seems more challenging as well!

@IchWill L&D would be great too.

Thank you both - going to look into both!

@Babyshowercot I've changed career through a sideways step. I was in Marketing but now work in Comms. The two disciplines have plenty of overlap, so I adapted my CV, focused more on the Comms stuff I did in my Marketing roles. Used key words that come up in Comms role job description.

For example, instead of talking about how I "ran advertising campaigns across various mediums". I would instead talk about "managing multi channel communications plans", and emphasise about my copywriting skills, rather than the ROI on campaigns I ran. None of my CV was a lie. I just created a version that emphasised much more on my skills that were more suited to Comms.

I ended up getting into PR, but found that the Comms I enjoy the most is actually internal Comms, which is my career now.

Internal Comms ties in with HR / Culture / Employee Engagement. So another possible option for you?

So, in your case, think of times you've mentored candidates, advised them on training and development that they should undertake, providing CV and interview feedback, coaching etc.

Good luck!

Name change fail. Shitty Santa was left over from a Christmas name change when I bought a really bad secret Santa gift. 😅

Are you a member of Cipd? Great resources for all sorts of hr/ L&D

@IchWill I think internal comms would be very interesting. I’m happy to start in a junior position and grow but I’m wondering if being older and more junior would mean my CV is overlooked!

Any company that would discriminate you for age, wouldn't be one you'd want to work for anyway.

I'm 46, been in Internal Communications about 6-7 years. Marketing 5 years before that and IT for 10 years before that! Didn't have to start at the bottom when I changed careers due to putting so much emphasis on the transferrable skills I mentioned and being persuasive in interviews.

I also started doing long-term temp Marketing roles and fixed term contracts to build up my experience in different sectors, methodologies and technology. It was a couple of those roles where Marketing, PR, Social Media, and Internal Communications were under the remit of one job title, hence I got a taste of Comms and realised I preferred it, hence specialising in it.

I didn't gain any extra qualifications to change careers either. I don't even have a degree. But I'm on good money and enjoy my job. I get to write every day, which I love, as well as design artwork, make videos, record and edit podcasts, and build intranet pages.

@IchWill thank you for sharing this. It’s motivating me to get into something I actually enjoy and find challenging - have a long few decades of working ahead of me still!