Career change after redundancy

confused_soul

I am posting this for a friend.

She has found out that she is being made redundant. She has a reasonable amount in savings and should be getting something from her redundancy package.

I know she hated her job but felt that she couldn't leave without something else to go for.

She wants to retrain and have a career change but is feeling pretty down about starting again.

I was wondering if anyone had been through a successful career change after redundancy? I would love to hear from people who have been through it so I can show her the posts. Hopefully she'll realise then that she's not the only one.

Kidley

Hello

Redundancy is a horrible thing I have had 3 in the last 6 years so I know. There are various opportunities out there you have to keep looking at all the options, i.e., college, part time work whilst you retrain in something. The armed forces. The reserve armed forces often you just need to keep busy and start doing different things to keep your spirits up.

I joined the RAF at the age of 30 and it's a job for 9 years minimum and will gain new skills in the process to aid me when I come out. Most important thing is to spend time with your friends and realize that it's not all that bad.

newmumincov

It wasn't exactly redundancy, but I have changed career twice and now have a job I love.

I started out wanting to be a scientist. Got a masters but couldn't get proper paid employment (I got internship and voluntary posts and worked in admin to support myself). After a couple of years of making pitches I got funding to do a Phd (it was my own proposal). Unfortunately I didn't submit my thesis for various reasons (divorce, chronic illness and exclusion for non-payment of fees) - so I wasted nearly 5 years. It was an absolute sucker punch to be honest and it's only really now in the last couple of years that I can look back without feeling sick to my stomach at it all.

I then ended up setting up a small business (I had an idea and a friend leant me some money which has since been paid back), but I'm no entrepreneur/salesperson and the business broke even only as long as I didn't draw any kind of salary. So I took a care job on top to pay the bills. I really enjoyed working as a carer and was offered a little promotion (doing rotas etc), but I didn't take it up as I wanted to go back to something mentally stimulating. My business wasn't going anywhere and to be honest was starting to get boring. (This was a 2 year interlude, in all)

So I started applying for interesting sounding jobs and I now have a good career in data analysis. Admittedly I didn't have to retrain before I got a job - I had enough transferrable skills to get in the door and work paid for any specialist training. However, I now look forward to going to work. To be honest I wish I'd done this years ago. OK I'm a bit older than most of my colleagues, but not all of them. I've even had a couple of colleagues who have been retired and have come back to work to keep busy!