Degree or not to degree?

[Threemangoes]

I’m 31 years old and have been working as a teaching assistant for 7 years. I have a level 3 Diploma in specialist support in schools.
I’ve got a one year old at home and I will be a stay at home mum until baby starts school.
I don’t want to be a teaching assistant for life.
I can start an open university degree but I’m struggling to pin point what job/career am I aiming at!
I have to prioritise my kids and family time always so I can’t choose teaching at all.
Is there another option other than a degree for me? Any other course that will help me find better jobs.
happy to answer all your questions if it means I can get some ideas

It depends what you want to do though that's the trouble. There are plenty of non degree courses that will help you retrain but only if they are something you want to retrain in

do you have any idea of things you might be interested in? What sort of things do you enjoy, and what are you good at?

Other than computing and anything to do with numbers I’m open to all ideas. I’m terrible at making decisions 🙈

😂in which case I am of no use to you as I was going to suggest data/software engineering type things

Hopefully someone with experience in things more suitable will be along soon to advise OP

Haha I’m glad I saved you time. But now that you’ve mentioned this could you sign post me anyways so could do some research. You never know! I would like to see it before I completely leave these options out.

https://www.womenintech.co.uk/news-guides

Women in tech have some useful guides to different roles. It's also worth thinking about non techy tech roles like project management, agile scrum master (if you can wangle kids to do what you want scrum master would probably seem like a breeze 😂)

Also don't rule yourself out of tech roles because of maths. I'm a coder who works in data and I haven't done maths since gcse and still count on my fingers half the time! But coding is like knitting so if you are a knitter you can code if that's at all relevant

Amazing!
That’s great help. I have taught coding in school on a basic level so understand your reference to knitting 🧶 Off I go to explore 🙃

If you have taught coding so understand it on a basic level and you are used to getting children to behave then scrum master sounds perfect! And my friend who is a scrum master stated on 35k and 3 years later was on 60k so it's a decent salary too (not MN everyone's on 100k decent, but real world decent)

Why don't you try some of the Open University free courses first at OU Learn, then if you want to pursue a degree oot for an open degree to start with. This may give you a career pathway as you study.