Jobs you have done you would NEVER recommend to your children

[OneUmberJoker]

McDonald's

Another vote for teaching. The stress and the workload are just too much.

To all you saying teaching, nursing etc I’m guessing you’ve never done really physically demanding or repetitive work for minimum wage, they are really bad jobs.

I worked through ever since holiday doing physically demanding jobs for minimum wage. I was hoping teaching would be better (hence working hard to get a degree and a job that paid more).

Teaching was so awful that I have left. That says quite a lot.

There is a Facebook group called 'Life after teaching: exit the classroom and thrive' which started a few years ago and now has 178,000 members. That says a lot, too.

I've been very very lucky and thoroughly enjoyed my somewhat varied careers. But I have told my kids that if they decide they want to write a book, not to give up the day job to 'be a writer'. It's taken me fifteen years to be able to earn enough from writing not to have to work outside the home as well.

Mind you, most of them are out earning me by a huge amount, so I don't think they'd be tempted!

Teaching. Even in my nice school with well-behaved kids, the workload is just totally impossible. As another poster said upthread, it's like doing a full-time job on top of another full-time job. Even though after 30 years I still love the actual teaching, you almost start to resent lesson time because you can't get through any of your other work while you're in lessons. It's ridiculous. If I were in a school where I had to deal with bad behaviour as well (very much have done in the past!), there is no way I would be surviving tbh.

We have the holidays of course, thank god. I've been away over Christmas, but will spend most of tomorrow till Sunday working before I go back on Monday.

Both my dc say they'd never be teachers, but dd 20 has no clue what she wants to do and she'd be good at it...

Well if teaching 'simply isn't right' for so many teachers that people are quitting in their tens of thousands and there aren't anywhere near enough trainees signing up to replace them (or quit after 1 ir 2 years) then I'd say it's a problem with the job, not a problem with certain teachers who are unsuited to it. I wanted to be a teacher since I was 12. I'm a good teacher. Unfortunately, the system is broken.

Anything dealing with the public.

It is quite a big issue for so many to say teaching or is MN populated with lots of teachers . In other countries teaching is a respected coveted profession. WTH has happened to our education system.

WTH has happened to our education system.

There was a definite issue when staffing payment switched from the councils to individual schools. When I started teaching, heads would interview and appoint the best person for the job, whether they were M2 or 30 years in and the county council paid salaries.

At some point this changed and heads had the whole budget. When this started to be squeezed, heads were forced to hire cheap teachers. Then, they started to target expensive teachers to make them leave.

It feels like this kick started things.

Michael Gove did a lot of damage as well. Curriculum mainly, but scrapping pay portability for teachers was very bad for the profession.

I'm a teacher. My DS graduated 3 years ago and cannot get any sort of non zero hour NMW job. I think he'd be a bad teacher ( he has some TA experience) but I now wouldn't discourage him as it's a steady, important, worthwhile job.

DS2 wants to be a journalist. Should this fail, I'd not discourage teaching at all. He's a historian and history teachers have higher job satisfaction.

The OP asked us to speak about jobs we have done, not imagine ones we haven't.

Teaching

👏😂

Teaching .

@HopSpringsEternal i am interested to know if tour perspective on sex work is from yours or family experience 🤣🤣🤣

Everything I've ever done. None of them pay enough to build a life these days, without relying on another person.

Former social worker. Stopped working when pregnant with DS1 who is autistic so never went back. If you are going in to social work you need a normal home situation or you'll crack.
But I have had plenty of jobs before that: aupair, nanny, nursery worker, McDonald's, care worker, call center, sales etc..
The worst experience was in a care home with elderly people with dementia. Some were aggressive and you had to duck or they would throw things or poo from their diaper at you. Not their fault ofcourse but very hard to deal with.

The workload has increased exponentially with no corresponding increase in pay or decrease in contact time. School budgets can't afford resources or experienced teachers. Behaviour has got worse and worse, exacerbated by social problems, poverty and poor parenting. Meanwhile senior leaders continue to force new initiative after new initiative on already overloaded teachers in order to appease Ofsted and make themselves look good.

Finance. (Especially investment banks). Totally soul destroying.

perhaps it simply wasn’t right for you and you went into it because at the time it was an obvious job.

If I absolutely loved it for 15 years but then over the last ten have felt the job has changed beyond belief and made my utterly miserable, that suggests that it wasn't that the job 'wasn't right' for me,

Ignore. It's the usual sneery idea that people just fall accidentally into teaching willy nilly.

As I said, I wouldn't discourage it at all for my DSs as I know how awful the grad job market is. But it would not be the right path for DS1 so I hope he finds something else.

I would actively discourage English teaching but positively encourage what I teach now.

Army.

Army.

Teaching.

Architect
Myself and dh are both Architects and didn’t recommend it to our children
One asked and we put him off
Designing is great and we’ve loved that side of it but in the big picture it’s a very small side and very few actually get to design
Generally we just have to deal with all the other crap for most of the time
Generally it’s demoralising and as @whirlyhead said another soul destroying career

I started teaching in 1982 and finished in 2022. There is absolutely no comparison between the job then and now.