Career/decisions late forties

[fortunatelynot]

I am interested in hearing from people who have or who are who are making career changes/decisions in their forties (or well into their career). I am going round in circles and will try to be as brief as possible

• been in education for 20 years, at a high level for last 8 years
• well paid but stressful, 60 hour weeks
• IF I stuck it out for another 5 or 6 years I could just about afford to retire at 55 (this would involve putting a significant amount into an ISA that I would live off plus my pension)

I have little work/life balance and am considering a change. My skills could get me a job earning significantly less but still over £50K remaining in the sector but not in a school. This would mean

• less money monthly (obviously)
• less money when I come to retire
• hopefully stress and better work/life balance.

What would you do?

Do you currently work in a school?

I changed career from teaching to data scientist/analyst at age 50. I'm 54 now. I was on UPS3 when I left, which was 41k at the time, took a drop to 28k, but within 18 months I was back on 41k and I'm now on 60k, and it will go up well past that with more experience. Definitely the right decision. I work 9-5, much lower stress than teaching and I'd be happy to keep doing this job for years yet, no plans to retire at all. I'm getting paid to sit on my arse at home and solve puzzles by writing bits of code. If I retired, all I'd do is sit and do crosswords puzzles or something and not get paid for it.

Yes currently in a school.

Then if I were you, I would reach out to a solid education sector executive search firm like Odgers with your CV and discuss senior office based opportunities with them.

The PE backed independent education groups have loads of roles that could give you an excellent salary for a 40 hour working week. Education Director, Curriculum Director etc etc. They may even have consultant opportunities.

As you don’t need a job asap, you could investigate various opportunities and ideas with the likes of Odgers and wait for a role that you like the look of to come along.

Thank you - I shall take a look!

Good luck! And don’t mention anything about willing to take a pay cut! You should be looking for a pay rise! You have a lot of experience, particularly if you have been Head or SLT for past 8 years. You will have skills and experience that the groups are willing to pay for.

How did you make the change? Did you do a course, and if so, could you tell me which one? Desperately in need of a new direction, always been good with data and Excel but no idea how to get into data analysis.

I already had coding experience from a previous career, and did some hobby coding. I just saw an entry level job and applied - it was for an educational publishing company, and my teaching experience combined with my coding experience meant I was an ideal candidate.

There are free or very cheap courses with codecademy Udemy and Simplilearn. Then there's ones with Code First Girls, if you're female. There are also MScs and one called Code Infinity, but they all cost £££. You need some knowledge of SQL & Python. I'd start off doing one of the free/cheap data analytics or data science courses - they should teach some SQL & python.

There is a role in the civil service called "Performance Analytics" which you could look at, they sometimes do apprenticeships.

@trui , thank you so much for those tips. I will look into it.