It can be simple

Waiting is not fun. On Monday I was emailed to say I should hear from
one of the government departments shortly - I know that two days still
counts in the "shortly" bracket, and that the government tends to move
pretty slowly, but still. Please call me. Please. Please please. I just
want to hand in my notice now - I'm taking on more and more projects at
work, and I have less and less motivation every day. After the
excitement of the past couple of weeks, sitting and waiting is just
interminably dull.

While there's nothing more interesting going on career-wise, I thought
you might be interested in a career-change story that shows it doesn't
always need to be difficult. My husband worked as a sales engineer for
four years, and while he loved it at first, he became more and more
convinced that he wasn't really cut out to be a salesman. The hours
bothered him, the constant sales targets were stressful, and while he
liked talking to people, he hated knowing that at the end of the
conversation he had to have persuaded them to buy something they might not really need.

So for about six months, he felt a bit disenchanted with his job, and
talked about doing other things. After watching An Inconvenient Truth,
he half-heartedly applied for a few jobs around climate change, and
helping make industries more energy efficient. This didn't really go
anywhere, and then he started thinking about what he really wanted in a
new job. His list was pretty different from mine - I'm looking for that
elusive "make a difference to the world" job, that also allows me to be
creative and technical and specialist and generalist and have plenty of
time to myself.

He wanted a job that would make him a lot of money, without too many
hours or stress, and that he could be really good at. Bizarrely, the
ideal industry for that is IT - once you have a few year's experience,
you can go contracting and earn a ridiculous amount while only working
your standard 8-hour days. Plus, with his engineering background and
strong tendency to fix things, a technical role should suit him down to
the ground. So once that was decided, we had a stressful few days (yes,
days - not the weeks, months or years that most career-shifters on this
site are going through) re-writing his CV and trying to find suitable
entry-level roles. We then went for a drink with my dad, who is also an
IT contractor (seems to be a family business!), who agreed to show his
CV to his colleagues and see if they had any advice. Two days later, my
husband got a call from the company my dad worked for...a week later he
was interviewed in a pub at Liverpool St, and basically offered the
perfect job on the spot.

So from beginning to end, the total career change took maybe 6 months -
and I'd say only about the last 4 weeks of that was spent really working
hard to make a change. And how's the change going? Well, he loves his
new job. The hours are good, he's picking up the work remarkably quickly
and he can already see his potential to earn has rocketed compared to
his last job.

I guess the message from this is that your career shift doesn't have to
be tremendously life-changing or horrendously difficult. And it's ok if
making money, or not working too hard, is your key motivator - if
everybody wanted to change the world, I don't think anything useful
would ever be achieved. I may have got too hung up over the past year
trying to find a career that will make me happy, rather than
appreciating that my personal life can make me happier than any job ever
will.