who here has career changed? or career-started when kids hit secondary. tell me all about it.

[hatwoman]

so...until 2 years ago I had a good job in my field. worked p-t but was middle-senior-ish well respected. combined it with lecturing sometimes. got fed up with the huge organisation I was with and decided to resign, move out of london, go freelance.

freelancing has been ok - but not great - perhaps the current climate etc. plus I miss an office, find it lonely. BUT we don't want to go back to London - and London is the only place in the UK where I could do my old job. so...maybe I should bite the bullet and retrain. I have 2 possibilities/ideas - they would both pretty much see me back in full-time work when the girls are both in secondary. but it feels scary - to invest a lot of time and effort between now and then - and to go back to working full-time, when, although I'm a hard-worker I haven;t done f-t for a long time.

what's it like? taking the pace back up again? and did you feel OLD???

I did have a radical career change. I started out as a doctor, but changed when my twins were nearly 3, I then did a law degree part time - at Birkbeck, so I did not feel old at all. They were nearly all mature students. I did feel my age when I did the Legal Practice Course. It was a bit of a culture shock to be in classes with people who spent their spare time texting and facebooking people who were not in the room with them, and then get messages when I was not in the room with them.

I remember feeling particularly ancient when one of the boys invited me to a party he was having spontaneously that evening, and when I said I could not come, he asked me what I was doing instead... I felt completely unable to break it to him that there are people who need 3 weeks in advance to arrange a babysitter

I really enjoyed the retraining and returning to work, although I do have to say that the ft - pt debate is really tricky. PT I feel as though I am not doing anything right; I always had the feeling that I wanted to do one thing in my life properly, whether it was kids or job. FT work and FT mum have different challenges. FT work is knackering, but actually you can only ever do one thing at a time. Every morning when I got into work I had that feeling you get when you finally take a seat on a plane - like nothing can touch me now. The children are now with school/ nursery/ au pair, felt exactly like if I had left a light on now it is too late/ not my problem.

Being a parent in an office can occasionally be tricky - having to fess up to my (younger, childless) boss that I may have caught nits from my kids, or asking for the day off after getting a phone call to say my children were suspended from school for messing around in the crocodile when walking down the round, were particular low points .

Hope that helps.

Yes, I've done it.

I had a management role in broadcasting. Jacked it in to go freelance, which lasted about two years. I made a fair go of it, but found it quite an isolating experience and missed the social interaction that came with working for an organisation.

I knew I didn't want to go back to working in the uber-competitive environment I had previously worked in, so I had a good rethink. Took about a year of thinking it through and doing bits of research and voluntary work...

In the end, I decided to retrain as a practitioner working with young people (being deliberately vague - sorry! - as I don't want to be identified). The biggest issue for me has been taking a big pay cut, as I am no longer a super-experienced manager in my field. I found retraining challenging (work-life balance etc - having to come home from a long day at university and plough through reading and writing essays after putting kids to bed...zzzzzzzzzz ), but ultimately, very rewarding.

I have eased in to working, to be honest. My kids are still fairly young, so it suits me not to work full-time, but ultimately, by the time they are secondary age, I would like to be back in a full-time role.

I say: feel the fear and do it anyway!

thanks both of you - really helpful posts. in actual fact jaybird law is one of my options. it's not a million miles away from my old job - and I have an LLM. one of the difficulties is that I have very specific ideas about the kind of law (the kind I studied)...everything else makes my eyes glaze over. And there is just one law firm in my area that does it. I wish I could apply for a training contract there before committing myself to the GDL.

I think I'm also a bit scared of law, because I expect f-t to be f-t plus. am guessing all my colleagues would be complete workaholics putting in 60 hour weeks. tb perfectly h I don't think I;d have a marriage if I did that.

Faamily your experiences of freelancing sounds very like mine. I do sometimes wonder if it will pick up again and I could get back into it more.