Need a career change - where to start?

[andnowforsomething]

I need to change careers. My current job (sales) is destroying my mental health, and also I'm bad enough at it that I'm pretty sure my employer is working towards replacing me, so a sideways move to the same job elsewhere isn't really an option.

I'm a humanities graduate in my early 30s. I need to be taking home around £1500 a month minimum to begin with. I can't afford to do another qualification unless it's possible to do it very part time and at very low cost. I'm in central Scotland with good commuting options. No kids yet but we hope to start trying soon, so family friendly would be a help.

Any ideas?

I think any job where you train whilst doing the job will struggle for your take home pay in the first instance. You might have to go down a bit to get better job satisfaction and no cost training. What humanities degree?

If you’re a graduate did you know you can get £10,000 student loan funding for a masters now? So no initial outlay. I’m a social sciences grad in my early 30s, doing a part time masters in a management field to do a bit of a career change, whilst working. So don’t discount qualifications as an option.

Have you got any sense of what you might like to do?

Good luck. I am early 30s with a humanities masters and have struggled mightily to change career - people only seem to want to employ you to do what you've always done.

Other jobs you might conceivably get into from a sales background:

Estate agent
Car dealership
Fundraising or donor relations
Customer relations/membership
Banking/financial services
Recruitment
Teaching or medical temporary worker agency

Do any of those appeal as a sideways move?

Hope that helps.

That take home pay works out as about £10ph if you work full time. That gives you quite a few options.
You could be a TA if you don't want the pressur eof retraining as ateacher, and then top up the hours with some tutoring in your specialist humanities subject to GCSE or A level. You'd need to research the syllabuses and exam formats and buy the texts but tutoring is well paid - anything from £15-40ph depending on area and subject.
You could move into sales in an area that you really enjoy - estate agency or travel?
It's hard to suggest much without knowing what area of humanities you specialised in.

Sorry, trying to be vague! My undergraduate degree is in history and then I did a master's in a particular area of history.

In Scotland you can only get a student loan for £5,500 towards postgraduate fees, which is at least a couple of grand less than every course I've looked at (they really thought that one through!) Otherwise I'd love to move into something social policy related, which would tie into some volunteering I do.

Teaching is totally out for me. I struggle to communicate with children and I honestly think it's one of those jobs you have to really, really want to do.

Thank you so much for the ideas so far. Fundraising/donor relations is definitely something for me to look into.

If you are looking for a fundraising role. Charity Job website is a good place to start, www.charityjob.co.uk

Look at the Institute of Fundraising website too, they have lots of information on the different fundraising streams and online training too.