To think I can get an enjoyable wfh job that pays 100k without working evenings and weekends?

[2kidsnewstart]

I am currently a civil servant earning 80k pro rata'd to my 4 day a week part-time hours. Lots of benefits (pension etc) but due to the kind of role I am in I am expected to return to the office more.

That is difficult for me as last year me and the kids' dad split up (6dd and 2dd) meaning I can't afford additional £65 daily train fares to London on top of nursery fees plus all the other bills. We are 50:50 which I have realised is a very expensive way of splitting up!

Plus I leave before 7am and get home around 8pm so would have to find someone to look after the kids on my days in the office (my ex and I coparent very well but he can't always do childcare around my work all the time and we have no family nearby).

The civil service is great but I am 38 and feel like I could have a whole other career ahead of me and I wonder if there's an absolutely dreamy role that would be challenging but satisfying, well-paid, allow me to wfh and not require evenings and weekends?

AIBNU: No there's definitely that kind of role out there if you open your eyes/ retrain! (and please specify what kind of role!)

AIBU: That unicorn does not exist you should stay where you are!

Those jobs do exist. I work in Cyber Security and it's 100% WFH and the pay is £90k and rising as we take on new customers.

wow! how do I get into a job like that?

I'm big4 and achieving that salary wouldn't be a given but entirely possible. No to wfh though, all roles are hybrid with an expectation of 2-3 days in the office. More in-person days possible due to client demand i.e. you couldn't always guarantee you could be home at a certain day a week forever

The jobs are available but are in the private sector and usually civil service employees aren’t qualified - either in actual qualifications or the type of work they do. Government jobs mostly have far, far less responsibility than the equiv private sector role.

They are there, don’t know about civil service but we wfh for over that

I work in Cyber Security and have such a role. I wfh and work 60 hours a week. I’ll get called in the middle of the night when there’s an incident / breach. I have to be in the office for confidential attempts and have needed to travel to London / Birmingham in the middle of the night for meetings.

My job is the same as yours except I get £12k instead of £80k. I’m also in the public sector.
I’ve been looking for a better paid, wfh, 4 day a week job for years and they just don’t seem to exist. I have the skills for cyber security as suggested by a PP, but have never seen anything like that advertised.

If you can find a suitable job, go for it - and let us know how we can get the same! 😁

I switched careers to medical coding so I could be a sahm. Wfh, great pay and benefits, pick your workload. It wasn't my dream job, but gave me everything I was looking for so I could still concentrate on the DC. The training took me about 8 months. It was hard but so worth it. And you can continue your training, improve your certifications and up your salary whenever you have the time/inclination to advance.

Heineken were advertising a SOC analyst role for £50k work from home just last month. They're all on LinkedIn. Often not advertised but listed on posts from Cyber recruiters.

Also, the industry is powered by events and networking (both offline and online)

This sounds interesting. Can you tell me more?

You could venture into tech. It's not just coding, there are a bunch of other disciplines. Including bonus I am just shy of six figures. I am remote, and open my laptop at 9:30am and close at 5pm. I do one week of on-call every few months, but it's manageable.

Could you do 5 shorter days until you find something that suits you better?

Can I ask what qualifications are needed for a job like yours please?

You have medical terminology, anatomy, and pathophysiology as prerequisites. Once those are done you actually learn to code. You have huge books, containing about a hundred thousand alpha-numerical codes that a diagnosis/treatment are converted to. I basically get your medical chart(redacted of personal information), I read your gps diagnosis and whatever procedures/meds you receive, and convert them to codes to send to your insurance provider for billing

Thanks so much everyone! fascinating and encouraging.

What skills / characteristics are needed in tech? Typically I am educated in the humanities so would really be starting from scratch.

I'm assuming you are in the US?!

im in the civil service too and very fed up. All the roles seems to have been downgraded in responsibility in recent years. I’m doing the type of work I might have done as an SEO 10 years ago and I’m bored. Promotions are impossibly competitive. I’d be really interested in retraining in something like this.

I am also so fed up of my sector (counselling/MH). I do a lot of dealing with paperwork and different cases. It's boring as hell. I am four days a week WFH but only £32K pro-rata and I feel as if I am just not using my brain at all. I'm M.A in sociology and would love to go into academic sectors or research but I just don't see any opportunities anywhere. It's pants, and I feel cheated for having studied so hard. I'd keep looking for opportunities OP. I still dream. And I am slightly older than you! I do appreciate that I am lucky in lots of ways but this is not how I expected life to be.

Yes. I apologise if it doesn't work the same way there. Our coding classification for diseases is international so I assumed it would be like that there as well

@GoawaySunrise this wouldn't exist because health insurance isn't much of a thing in the UK

I was more thinking along the lines of people over here generally don't have health insurance due to having the NHS so jobs are probably not as freely available!

Generally most of the UK population doesn't have insurance; it's all through the NHS, and the doctors notes are the coding - they don't need to be recoded, so it wouldn't be a job that exists here. If someone was claiming through insurance, the insurance company would sort the costs, rather than being billed.

They don't have it very often here either, but it still has to be converted for processing. That's partly why I picked only coding instead of billing as well. I don't like confrontation and most of the billing aspect is just harassing people about payment. You make more money doing coding and billing together, but I just don't have it in me to harass people about medical bills they can't pay

Also my experience is that evening working is pretty expected, especially for big client deadlines. Very flexible though - you can do it once the kids are in bed.

I escaped left Big4 and work in house in tax. Fully remote, 9-5, £80k, 30 days holiday and 12% pension contributions.

Youd need a tax qualification though which were by far the hardest exams I’ve ever been through

It is actually a job here too- both in the nhs and private sectors.

https://www.stepintothenhs.nhs.uk/careers/clinical-coder