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Hi, sorry if this should go in another thread, I skimmed, but didn't find anything. I've been in and out of college for most of my 20's, coasting by on retail work, but it looks like finishing university might be out of my reach financially. What's a good way to get into a decently paying career at my age, starting with very few concrete marketable skills? I'm in my late 20's now. I can write fairly well, have decent physical stamina, can speak Spanish passably and am very willing to learn new things. I've started teaching myself coding and Chinese but I'm still in the VERY early stages of learning python. Going back to community college for a certificate in something isn't out of the question. The one big issue that could affect things is my poor mental health. I'm at a crossroads and really don't want to give into despair right now. What should I look into, career wise? What are good first steps to take? What have I maybe aged out of and what should I not bother with?
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Jan 20, 2019 07:49
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Since you don't appear have a plan, I suggest you concentrate on earning and saving some money until you really get excited about something. OK - is physical labor a problem? If not, I can guarantee it will be good for your mental health. You might even have a bit of fun at your age working on a factory floor, or wherever, with other people you can bounce off during the day. That means going home on the dot, leaving you with about six hours to pursue your other interests, while earning money, and hopefully getting closer to finding what you really want to do. Another thing to remember is that late 20's feel 'catastrophic' to you. I'm in my early 40s, and the older I get, the more convinced I am that no-one really knows what they're doing. The sooner you come to terms with that the better. It's a far better position than waking up at 65 and realising that you've hated your life. Yes, you will have lovely days no matter how 'perfect' the job is, but don't lose sight of the fact that you don't even remember the first gulf war. Or VHS tapes.
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Jan 21, 2019 10:02
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Pudding Space posted:Another thing to remember is that late 20's feel 'catastrophic' to you. I'm in my early 40s, and the older I get, the more convinced I am that no-one really knows what they're doing. The sooner you come to terms with that the better. It's a far better position than waking up at 65 and realising that you've hated your life. Yes, you will have lovely days no matter how 'perfect' the job is, but don't lose sight of the fact that you don't even remember the first gulf war. Or VHS tapes. Definitely this. My 20s were a horrid period for me, but I'm 31 now, and ever since I turned 30 everything has been looking up substantially - with more life experience and personal development under my belt, I've found direction and security and carved out my own psychological space in the world. It's not perfect, I still have further to go before I truly feel like I'm safely headed towards establishment, but the 31st year of my life has been far better than every year of my 20s. And this is a trend I see very commonly among friends and acquaintances, a lot of people feel utterly buried and lost in their 20s, and worry that they're failing at life. The notion that you're supposed to have your career, family, and love life sorted before 30 is utter horseshit, at least among millennials. Don't think you're a dropout buddy, figuring out life takes as long as it takes.
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Jan 21, 2019 17:55
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Vinny Possum posted:Hi, sorry if this should go in another thread, I skimmed, but didn't find anything. As a concrete answer to your "decently paying job for a late 20-something with no specialized training" question: Software QA (Quality Assurance) tester. You test software that's under development. The main things you'll need are the patience to stare at the same app all day, attention to detail, and the ability to write clear reports/tickets for the engineering team. You can use it as a springboard to get to know the software industry. Looking on Glassdoor, entry level QA make around $60k in the city I'm in, and that's 1% over the national average. As a less concrete answer to the other questions: I think the first step in thinking about your career is to identify your strengths and weaknesses. You don't have to post them or anything, but you should seriously start figuring that out and writing it down somewhere. By strengths, I mean things which you can do and you enjoy doing. For instance, some of my strengths are that I can program a computer, speak in public, and cook. (Before I learned how to program, I might have expressed this as "I'm comfortable working with abstract ideas" or "I'm good at logic problems" or something like that.) Your weaknesses are things which you cannot do or you don't enjoy doing. For instance, some of my weaknesses are that I don't make friends easily, I'm not at all athletic, and I can't draw. These are pretty serious weaknesses which disqualify me from many things, or at the very least mean that I'd be extremely unhappy and incompetent if I somehow talked my way into a job requiring those things. When you're thinking about your strengths, try to do so without being self-limiting or self-critical -- I noticed that you diminished the few you listed (write 'fairly well', etc) and so I worry that you might have trouble with that and overlook things which you're better at than you think. For instance, to pick on "write fairly well" a little more, you wrote a grammatically excellent post which clearly stated your situation and asked for specific information. This is more than many professionals I've met can seem to do. Thinking about strengths and weaknesses can also be useful in helping you decide where to spend your time. For example, if one of your weaknesses is "I can't follow complex chains of logic", maybe studying programming is not a good way to go. Once you've done that, you should take your strengths and do some research as to what jobs capitalize on them. Once you have a few ideas, find some people who do those jobs and reach out to them. Say that you're a young person interested in being a (their profession) and ask if they'd be willing to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you answering a few questions. (This is called an "informational interview" in corporate-speak if you want to google what the etiquette is around asking for/doing this.)
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Jan 22, 2019 06:59
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If you are really down with physical labor I suggest some sort of equipment/vehicle technician. The market is very strong for these jobs, and you require limited advanced certification if you work your way up. You get to do some problem solving and work with both your hands and your mind. The pay is quite decent. The downside is that there is not a lot of opportunity for advancement and burnout is pretty high. But yeah, you really have to start off with a what do you want to do and what are you good at
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Jan 22, 2019 17:24
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Being willing to do physical labor opens up a few doors that might otherwise be closed. I think the first thing to start with, as others have said, is what do you want to do? It's cliche, but what would you like to be doing 10, 20 years down the road? Do you like the outdoors? Are you a "people" person, etc?
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Jan 22, 2019 19:32
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Hi! Thanks for the responses and encouragement everyone.Pudding Space posted:
Jim Long-un posted:Definitely this. My 20s were a horrid period for me, but I'm 31 now, and ever since I turned 30 everything has been looking up substantially - with more life experience and personal development under my belt, I've found direction and security and carved out my own psychological space in the world. It's not perfect, I still have further to go before I truly feel like I'm safely headed towards establishment, but the 31st year of my life has been far better than every year of my 20s. And this is a trend I see very commonly among friends and acquaintances, a lot of people feel utterly buried and lost in their 20s, and worry that they're failing at life. The notion that you're supposed to have your career, family, and love life sorted before 30 is utter horseshit, at least among millennials. Don't think you're a dropout buddy, figuring out life takes as long as it takes. My worry with my age is more that I'm actually starting something new from scratch, with no experience, only a year or two shy of thirty. I feel like potential employers will look down on that, and that they'll perceive it as laziness, unreliability or stupidity, and go for someone younger. fantastic in plastic posted:As a concrete answer to your "decently paying job for a late 20-something with no specialized training" question: I found this very helpful, thank you! What would be a good way to put the my strengths onto a resume, especially when there's no real work experience aside from mostly unrelated retail stuff involved? Getting my foot in the door feels very daunting and confusing. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:If you are really down with physical labor I suggest some sort of equipment/vehicle technician. The market is very strong for these jobs, and you require limited advanced certification if you work your way up. You get to do some problem solving and work with both your hands and your mind. The pay is quite decent. The downside is that there is not a lot of opportunity for advancement and burnout is pretty high. sparkmaster posted:I think the first thing to start with, as others have said, is what do you want to do? It's cliche, but what would you like to be doing 10, 20 years down the road? Do you like the outdoors? Are you a "people" person, etc? That's a part of the problem. What I always wanted to do was academic research. When I realized that that was never happening, I settled on teaching. However, if I can't finish university (highly likely), that's not a possibility. I do enjoy talking to people and get along with others pretty well. I've considered sales or something similar, but I'm not very confident in my ability to persuade other people to buy a product. Ideally, I would like to do something involving writing, but I'm having a hard time thinking of writing based careers that aren't gig work, or, if there are things out there, how I would get started in the field.
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Jan 23, 2019 02:02
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Vinny Possum posted:I found this very helpful, thank you! What would be a good way to put the my strengths onto a resume, especially when there's no real work experience aside from mostly unrelated retail stuff involved? Getting my foot in the door feels very daunting and confusing. I'm glad my advice was helpful. Concrete resume advice is a little beyond my competence, at least outside of my field. There's this goon in SA-mart who does resume consulting as a business. You might want to get in touch with them and see what they think. I've given feedback on some software developer resumes in the newbie software developer thread, and I've noticed that in general there are a few things that folks new to the work world do wrong on a resume. First, understand that most people will only spend a minute or two looking over your resume. This means you need to be very direct and to the point in your writing. When describing an accomplishment, use a bullet point that's a sentence or two long. Second, anything you can back up with numbers and figures is good, and reasonable estimates of the impact is OK. If you've ever trained people, led a shift, made suggestions to your boss about ways the store could improve, calmed down angry customers, etc, those can be starting points. Finally, Remember that a resume isn't a vast objective accounting of everything you've done in your career. It's a sales document designed to persuade someone to pick up the phone and give you a call for an interview. Companies want to hire people to help them make money, and in most fields companies are looking for attitude and coachability at the entry level more than genius-level aptitude. If you've got a good attitude, can be coached how to do things properly, and a baseline level of "not an idiot", I think a lot of doors can be open to you if you present yourself well.
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Jan 24, 2019 04:32
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Go to the trades homeboy, go to the trades.
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Feb 23, 2019 02:05
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Fairly new to this forum but here's what's worked for me recently, I'm Australian however so costs and licenses etc may be different in the states: I'm 29 turning 30 this year, have spent most of my life working in hospitality and have reached the point where I can make an ok living from it managing restaurants, cafes or bars. Hospitality is soul crushing however and I decided a couple years ago that I needed to get out. Maybe a year or two ago I bought a cheap little hobby FPV drone and started flying it for fun, it was about $200ish and I spent a bunch of time learning to fly and messing around with the thing. Mid way through last year I went and did a commercial drone course, cost about $3000 for the week long course and allows you to commercially operate UAV's up to 25kg (fairly big) under Australian law. I also purchased a more expensive hobby drone second hand for around $1200 and have since put a bunch of hours into that, I wanted to do more then photography with the thing so got really interested in aerial surveying and photogrammetry and did a few little projects on my own for fun. At the end of last year I applied for a UAV pilot position with a company that does photogrammetry work digitizing assets and making kickarse 3D maps, mostly for mining, oil and gas. I didn't expect to hear back from them and didn't meet some of the requirements listed on the job but decided to apply anyway because why not? Got the call back at the start of this month, made it through two rounds of interviews and will be starting the job in June. Drone's are going to be massive, they are already pretty big but pretty much everything is heading towards automation. Any business that is currently running light aircraft or helicopters will make the switch eventually so think coast guard, surf life savers, police, fire, ambulance, agriculture not to mention photography roles such as surveying, real estate, movie production etc. I live in Western Australia where there are massive mining operations ongoing up north so I'm in a pretty good position to break into this industry but with the US being as massive and diverse as it is, I'm sure there are opportunities out there. It was a quick and reasonably cheap (compared to university) barrier to entry and as long as you are passionate about the technology you can get your foot in the door. Something to think about.
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Feb 28, 2019 03:01
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Sales is an option without a degree, but it's very stressful if you can't handle "rejection" (not talking-to-girls-in-a-bar "Get Away You Creep", but more along the lines of "Yea I know we've been talking for weeks/months but we're not interested in your product anymore") and you have to be very confident and affable towards people while knowing your poo poo as well. If you've considered it at all though, it can't hurt to give it a shot somewhere, I tried it randomly and fell in love with it.
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Mar 23, 2019 19:58
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Vinny Possum posted:
Don't you worry about that yet. Wait for a recession to come along and all of your competition is 20 years older and fighting at the same entry level position.
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Mar 26, 2019 07:29
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CRUSTY MINGE posted:Don't you worry about that yet. Wait for a recession to come along and all of your competition is 20 years older and fighting at the same entry level position. Wait for a recession to come along and you're 20 years older and all of your competition is 20 years younger without spouses to support, children to take care of, or health issues, and the employer won't even look at you because they can hire someone younger for less money of course, who will not be that irritating "old" thing.
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Mar 26, 2019 15:33
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Go be an electrician or a plumber or a carpenter. There are almost no young people in the trades and youth is welcome. Show hustle and you're good. You will learn a lot. Don't worry if you don't know poo poo about what a soil stack is. They will teach you. You'll start off as a go-fer and work your way up. You can make a lot of money.
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Mar 31, 2019 20:32
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