To ask you to suggest a career for me?

[Miajk]

Looking for wisdom from mumsnetters!

Currently very unhappy in my job (marketing). Mid twenties. No degree, earn circa £50k per year. Suspect I might have ADHD but no diagnosis (very long wait times).

Things I enjoy or interest me:

• problem solving
• analysis and data/investigating and analysing
• brainstorming
• flexibility and autonomy
• crime
• nutrition (but due to previous ED history I don't think a career in this field would be a fit for me)

I am very driven and hard working (but sadly only when I'm motivated/want to). Got good grades in school. Happy to take a paycut to retrain. Good at picking up new tech quickly, but struggled with having the right mindset or patience for coding.

Things I hate:

• corporate waffle
• internal politics
• greedy shareholders
• "bullshit jobs"
• being unfulfilled
• rigid structure

I'd love a career that is somewhat recession proof, gives me good skills to be employed or self employed, has a good work life balance and pays okay (enough to live, and do a bit of travel).

Is there anything out there that fits the bill? 😀

Definitely not teaching. No flexibility, no autonomy and working within a rigid structure.

Police sounds a good fit, but no public sector job will pay that kind of money. The police are talking about degree requirements, but haven’t yet installed one as far as I know, which is good given the cost. Cost of training and low wages being why those that can are striking.

Business Analyst?
Look up job ads to see if you’d like it as a job, if yes - do a course. Maybe affiliate yourself with The Chartered Institute for IT and do course(s) with them if you want CPD in that area.

Another idea - forensic accounting/auditing. Or Compliance jobs. But you’ll have to complete some courses.

I have been thinking about this one!! Need to look into it a bit more but from what I've read so far it could be a good fit

I did think about an intelligence role within the civil service or police. Sadly unsure about the police culture/work environment based on all the recent news...

Yeah I admire teachers, dont think I could ever do that job! I enjoyed being a tutor but the subject I did isn't something useful any longer (teaching English as a foreign language abroad)

Perhaps a Data Analyst at somewhere like Google? I have a friend that made a sideways step from digital marketing into Google and she loves it.

Learn Alteryx, Tableau and Power BI and freelance as a business analyst/data visualisation consultant. If you don't like internal politics or shareholder greed you won't be suited to corporate or civil service but they could be your clients as a freelancer. Also with Adhd you may find working for yourself better as you can choose your own hours, turn down work that doesn't interest you.

Speech and language therapist?
Problem solving- finding out root causes of issues and finding different types of solutions.
Can be a nutrition element and SaLT have involvement with people who have things like swallowing problems and need thickened liquids or blended foods- so has nutrition elements without the diet culture/ED aspect.
Depeneds where ypu choose to work but there can be a lot of flexibility and there is no corporate nonsense.

Also generally none of the things you hate, and I have known a few who work as freelance speech therapists

forensic IT

You sound exactly like me, I’m in a very similar position, work in marketing on fairly decent money and often feel very unfulfilled. I enjoy many of the things you enjoy and hate many of the things you hate.

I looked into speech and language therapy, it really stood out to me and the only reason I haven’t gone for it is because I already have a degree, therefore can’t get much help to obtain another one and the costs would cripple me.

Other things I looked into were civil service roles doing investigative work as someone suggested upthread. Lower pay at first, but with potential to earn more.

I also looked into becoming a prison officer, which bizarrely really appealed to me, but the reality of the risk vs very low pay put me off in the end.

If you like data then something in data will pay well, use your transferable skills, still has some skills shortages and is reasonably recession proof

If you don't like coding there are plenty of low code/no code roles. Look at data governance, scrum master, product owner etc

You sound a lot like me, OP, but I m much older.
Would really love a career change, but mostly because my area doesn’t pay well which became profoundly evident in the light of cost of living crisis. I work in academia (research scientist) but due to family commitments can’t afford a pay cut (from the measly 38K a year)

I also thought something in the data analyst field might work

I was similar to you. I got an intelligence role in the police. Basic entry level but shifts and overtime made it c.35k a year.

I find the culture fine. Better than the nhs and academia tbh. Don’t know whether it’s my role or area but it was a bit of a culture shock when I first phoned someone up to pass on a case and they said “yes, right, that needs x y and z, I’ll sort it”. Nhs I used to get moaned at and didn’t I know how busy they are and couldn’t I find another department to do it….

it’s also very positive re promotion and/or moving departments. I had quite a bit of encouragement from my line managers and am now in a £40k specialist role. Again with potential for overtime, there is the same role shift based which would bring in another 5k or so as well.

I find it really interesting. It’s basically interrogating lots of databases to find information, and patterns of offending.

Forensic accounting a great job, ticks a lot of your boxes.

Data type job a good call for the future but you'd need qualifications.

That sounds like the ideal CV for somebody in application support (ie not a techie fix-the-servers-when-they-break role, but more one for large enterprise application software).

However, it's not the sort of thing where you can hop in at £50k. In fact, you're likely to start at £20k; usually, those roles require a degree, but a good few years of experience in the real world should offset that quite handily. These days, a degree is useful for most job applications purely to show an ability to get down and grind work out - sector-specific subjects aside, it's no indicator of aptitude or intelligence, and the knowledge gained in a degree is usually either useless or wrong.

I do a lot of interviews for data jobs and for someone transferring from another field we look for transferable skills and maybe some courses to fill the gaps but not qualifications as such unless its a scrum master role and that's fairly easily obtained with the right training course and certification

Project developer for energy and environment projects.

I'm decent with spreadsheets (regEx, lookups, pivots, formatting, automated trackers)

Decent with numbers and data vis, have experience with Looker.

Never used SQL or tableau/power Bi but think I could pick it up quickly. In the last 5 years reporting and analysis made up around 40% of my workload, including building out dashboards in looker by blending data sources.

Do you think i would have to start from scratch as a data analyst as most jobs ask for SQL and power Bi or tableau experience specifically?

All these suggestions are great thank you so much! Delayed response as have been stuck doing unpaid overtime as usual:(

I thought about this one but I think the super heavy finance and regulatory component could be too much for me haha

That's really cool did you need a degree or previous relevant experience? Is it 9-5 or shifts and weekends?