Poor work history/mental health - what should I do?

I think there will be a few posts offering a reality check to you. You say you want it all, tomorrow, without working for it. That is not going to happen.

In my opinion your only way to become a skilled professional is to start early at the bottom and work your way up. This option is not available to you. To become a skilled professional you need a skill, which comes from either a qualification or experience and it requires time, time which you have ruled out.

Have you gone on any courses that available to you being on the dole to improve your prospects? Well then you'll have to start at the bottom then, in perhaps Warehousing or Retail and use the jobs to upskill. What's to stop you asking for more experience doing this, doing that when you're in a job 'Can I stay late and help you with that please?'. That is how you upskill.

I guess you see me and think you could do my job and why I am doing it and not you, it's not fair. But you don't see how I got there.10 years ago I was working in a factory making road signs it was a very dead end job. I wanted all what you wanted, so I decided to do something about it. I went to college in the evenings for a few years, had no social life and wasn't earning much either but I did it and am now a Chartered Accountant, a skilled professional.

Why don't you start with more realistic goals, say within 1 year you want an entry level job in a company that interests you. Then see what skills the person above you has and try to attain those skills. Don't stop doing that until you reach the top!

This forum is not going to magic up a career for you.

What do you actually like doing? What careers do you admire? Do have a particular interest in your personal life you'd like to develop?

For example, because of your personal health issues, would you like to work with vulnerable people in social care or project work, supporting people with physical or mental health issues, addictions, homelessness? If so, now is the time to gain voluntary work with a charity to boost your CV and check that it's the right career for you. This could eventually lead into a management or coordination role. Perhaps it could form the basis for you to train as a counsellor.

Do you have the appetite for self employment? Creating your own work gets around the fact that you aren't necessarily going to be attractive to regular employers. However, self employment is not for everyone.

There are plenty of websites that give ideas for cheap start ups. My gardener charges £150 a day and is booked up months in advance. My pet sitters are also booked up in advance and get around £10 a visit but might have half a dozen or dozen bookings a day. My previous cleaner got around £12 per hour. Dog walkers in my area can charge a tenner a walk. However, there will be periods when they don't earn a penny.

Would you like a less well paid but perhaps more secure type of employment where there is a possibility of promotion by merit?

If so, the Civil Service recruits hundreds of entry level jobs at AA/AO (admin assistant and admin officer) in massive intakes each year all across the country. The bulk are mainly contact centre roles dealing with tax claims and tax credits (HMRC) and benefit claims (DWP) but there are other departments.

They often have no or low entry requirements (5 GCSEs) with perhaps an online test that can be practised. However, the interview questions will be competency based and so you will need to provide concrete examples of delivering a piece of work at pace (time sensitive), collaborating and partnering to achieve an objective (team work), managing quality or similar. You can use examples from personal life, studies or employment.

So you can join the Civil Service on around 17k per year, then make the next grade to 19k, then the next one into management around 23k but this could take years.

You don't sound like you have the patience for this but the Civil Service is a major recruiter who won't hold your weak employment history against you as long as you can prove competency through online tests and/or interview.

Either way, you will learn business skills that you can transfer into the private sector. Download the Civil Service Competency Framework and get an understanding of the competencies you will have to show to get an entry level job (many companies have competency based interviews).

Have you considered call centre work? Some people consider this 'beneath' them but the big companies like the banks do offer proper training and again have low entry requirements for qualifications or employment history. A person on this forum says his company loves recruiting employees from call centre backgrounds because of their strong employment skills, so it seems quite transferable and leads onto other things.

I agree with others that you are being a little bit unrealistic in terms of what you want, and what you are prepared to do to get it.
You've phrased you post in a fairly negative way - there is a list of things you don't want to do, but not so much about what you would be interested in or feel you could so well.

What do you feel your strengths are? Are the any elements of your past history which you feel you could turn into a positive? For instnace, (depending on whether your involvment with drugs led to any criminal convictions) you might look into options working with young offenders, early intervention programs to help people avoid getting pulled in to those issues, areas such as counselling etc. These specific ideas might not suit you, but it may be worth thinking about whether there are other experiences you have had which you've learned from or which could be useful.

If you can identify the type of career you would like, you could also look at part time courses or the Open University so that you could combine working and study.

Consider looking at access courses which might give you some initial experience of being a mature student.

My Brother in Law left schol at 16. He was briefly in the RAF and then had various jobs, none of them particualrly challenging or with long term career prospects. At 35 he did an access course and then a degree, and now works in the NHS. He was older than most of the other students on his degree course but in many ways he felt that gave him an advantage when it came to lookingfor jobs etc - he was much clearer about what he wanted, he already had lots of life experience, and expeirience of holding down a job and understnading that every job has boring / unpleasant aspects. I think that he fact that he had made a deliberate choice to go back into education and to give up paid work to do so made a diference, too - employers rightly saw it as an indication of his committment.
He also got on well with the younger students.

So don't rule out the possibility of further educatation once you can identify what type of career you would like to have.

Do you know what your triggers are for becoming unwell? That's likely to be fairly importnat in looking at what kind of jobs may suit you - do you work best in a team or independently, for instance? Do you benefit from having a structered environment with clear rules and procedures, or do you do better in a more fluid environment? This might make a difference to whether you will do better in a large organisation or in a smaller buisness.

If you don't want to go o university then think about tyoes of wok where you might be able to train and progress on the job - as an example, my compnay currently has two staff mmembers both of whom joined as office juiniors, who are now being trained within our cashiers department. We are sending them on external courses as well as having the on the job training and they will gain accounts qualifications, and specific qualifications relating to our industry. This does require work on thei part as well as ours - we are paying their course fees and they get paid study leave for attending the courses and for exams, but they do have to study in their own time as well. They curently earn more than they did as office juniors and have been given pay rises as they develop.

I have a friend who started her working life as a secretary, worked for various firms of solicitors and is now a paralegal runnng her own caseload.

My brother did various 'entry level', not very interesting jobs while he studied for his OU degree. He then managed to get onto the BBCs graduate training programme despuite being, at that point, a mature student so competing against younger application who had gone directly to university from school. As with my BIL, I think that the etermination and self-discipline that he demonstrated by choosing to go down the mature student route and sticking to but were advantages, not disadvantages, when it came to job hunting.

You mention that you are volunteering at an animal shelter - is thisfor a small local organisation, or one linked to a bigger charity? If it is the latter, you could make enquiries about whether there are any openings for either volunatary or paid work elsewhere in the organsation - for instance, if you want a creative job, do they have a dedicated fundraising or publicity department where you could use those skills? Volunteering in the office rather than at the shelpter might allow you to build up useful, ttransferable skills and might also but you in a strong position to apply for any paid jobs which come up.