Forget that I ever existed

MovingForwards

I had great ambitions of climbing the career ladder, a mix of circumstances caused me to evaluate everything and step right back down.
Occasionally I get glimmers of wanting to revert back into it, look at jobs and the respective companies, but that's as far as it goes.

Now I have a work / life balance, crave for less hours but for now I need the money to clear the mortgage and know when I can implement the next stage of my plan.

As with all your posts, any change has to come within and until you know what you want, your fishing trips are only adding further frustration.

tealady

Ambrose Bierce defined a "career" as "a headlong rush, frequently downhill"
Dont get hung up on being "successful", just on being happy.
Better a happy dustman than a miserable brain surgeon.

route101

I'm in my early 30s and only finished uni last year. Before that I worked in retail on min wage. At 33 really need to boost my income, as min wage means cant buy house or get a car. So looking for career right now, but not easy when you don't have experience.

davilown

ushjr said:

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. They're 51, have no qualifications and have always done unskilled jobs which they don't like. The light at the end of the tunnel is that their mortgage will be paid off soon and they're planning to work part time after that. Not a bad position to be in.

I was once young and ambitious, I wanted to be the international business traveler, I wanted to be the man who stops at a motorway service station for a coffee on my way to a meeting, I wanted to be the man with a laptop and mobile phone talking business with colleagues on a train, I wanted to be the man in a suit stood on the pavement in front of a city pub with a pint in my hand at 5pm on a Friday. I've done all the above at various points and its not what its cracked up to be.

Now I'm 40 and just want to get to the position my friend is in, I'm around half way there. Yet I could sell up and move back to the North West and buy a house in cash tomorrow, but I choose not to so maybe I'm more bothered about my career than I think I am.

I spent 20 years chasing promotion after promoting the military. One morning I literally woke up thinking, why am I doing this?

I quit that job and trained to be a secondary school science teacher. 2 years in and still love it! Pay is okay, having the military background has allowed me to make use of time management and limited planning time at school for lessons (possibly spend 2-4 hours a week working at home, unless there are exams to mark).

Best trait to have? The ability to say no. Amazing how few ‘opportunities’ come my way now 😁

CharllieSays

I finally managed to get a senior management position and was pushed out by the CEO for refusing to have an affair. The higher up the ladder you go, the more corrupt things seem to get in my experience. Power does seem to poison a lot of people. They think because they can dangle a nice salary over you, they can expect other things. It isn't worth the stress and insanely long hours.

I'm now deliberately applying for lower level roles rather than the 80+ hour week 'flashy' job titles. I'd love a remote web/phone support or marketing job in a small start-up that I can walk away from at the end of the day. But since I can't get a reference from the above role, I'm currently a bit stuck!

Don't put a career above everything else. There are far more important things in life.

Marvel1

I thought I wanted too climb up the promotion ladder, until I had first hand experience in the management role of a team of 10 staff. 

Didn't like it - the sickness process of long term, monthly performance meetings etc it's not me, much happier staying in my role being another member of staff and no staff responsibility, not worth the extra £

Armorica

What can be fun for a lot longer, is getting into a senior but technical expert role that doesn't come with staff management responsibilities. 

motorguy

Armorica said:

What can be fun for a lot longer, is getting into a senior but technical expert role that doesn't come with staff management responsibilities. 

Thats pretty much what i did.  I love the technical hands on side of IT but not the progression through management.  I was a database admin for years which paid well and i enjoyed it, but sadly the company i was with closed up their local site here in NI and moving to the mainland head office wasnt an option.

Took redundancy, took on a role as a Technology Manager which was ok, but then got offered the IT Director role when the IT Director was fired.  Did that for a couple of years but when i hit 40 i concluded that it wasnt for me and resigned.

I'm now an IT contractor which gets me all of the money but with the hands on stuff and none of the people responsibility / management hassle.

amandacat

I believe the key is to be happy in life, for some that is a progressive career with lots of money, for others it’s a career they enjoy where they are financial comfortable and for others it having a job to pay the bills but working to live rather than living to work. 

What’s important is not to spend 40 or more hours a week in a job being miserable. Also your perspective can change at different stages of your life. 

I spent about 5 years of my 20s in undergraduate and postgraduate education, at the time I loved studying and partying. The jobs I did in my 20s got me by financially but I didn’t enjoy them but my key focus was having fun.
My 30s is when I really focused on a career, bought a house, progressed to management level and went from high debt/low income at the start of my 30s to no debt/good income by the end of my 30s. I loved my job, was hungry to progress. 

Now I’m in my 40s my focus has changed, I now resent my management job and the high pressure environment at work and have no interest in progressing further, in fact I want to now leave and move back to the technical non managerial type role I previously did, even though I will take a pay cut. 

I’ve relocated from south to north and am in the process of buying a house where my mortgage will be 40% of what it was before. As soon as I complete I’ll be job searching to find my ‘happy’ again. I want to go back to a role where I still use my skills but where I only need to worry about my own performance instead of a whole region I manage and not have the endless video calls about performance levels etc 

Lockdown has also made me realise that once we get our freedoms back I want a job I can forget about at the end of the day and enjoys weekends away, holidays etc and start focusing on my own life rather than work. 

Marcon

amandacat said:

I believe the key is to be happy in life, for some that is a progressive career with lots of money, for others it’s a career they enjoy where they are financial comfortable and for others it having a job to pay the bills but working to live rather than living to work. 

What’s important is not to spend 40 or more hours a week in a job being miserable. Also your perspective can change at different stages of your life. 

What a really sensible answer - hits the nail on the head.

For me, having a really enjoyable and satisfying career that enables me to have the lifestyle I want, and only work when I want, is brilliant. Before anyone takes me to task for sounding horrendously smug, I have to admit it took a quarter of a century to reach this pinnacle of overnight(!) success but it was worth the hard graft and long hours when I was younger. There were plenty of sacrifices along the way and if I were starting out again now, especially with the recent experience of lockdown...who knows if I'd feel the same way? 

Careers aren't everything for everybody and why should they be?