I’m 50 and need to get a job. What should I do?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP -- would you qualify to be a school counselor? What would that take? Seems like a better job than being a teacher, and would have a better salary than a teacher's assistant. Less intense daily interaction with so many kids as a counselor.

Or maybe something administrative -- it really just depends on how much $$ you actually need. Is this the money you need to pay the mortgage, or just a job to start contributing to social security?

This is a licensed position that requires significant graduate work in school psychology.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I second the preschool option. They always need subs, aides and administrators. I would check with private schools as well.

but they get paid nothing. I think these are dead end jobs for most people. Substitute teaching is the worst. The pay is a joke.

Can these jobs be used as jumping boards to some other jobs? If you have no resume, and a general degree without special training that you got decades ago you gotta start somewhere. I don't think she can jump into a "career" type of jobs right away unless she has some specialized skills and connections or she goes for a new degree.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I second the preschool option. They always need subs, aides and administrators. I would check with private schools as well.

but they get paid nothing. I think these are dead end jobs for most people. Substitute teaching is the worst. The pay is a joke.

Can these jobs be used as jumping boards to some other jobs? If you have no resume, and a general degree without special training that you got decades ago you gotta start somewhere. I don't think she can jump into a "career" type of jobs right away unless she has some specialized skills and connections or she goes for a new degree.

Preschool teaching can be lovely for someone who loves it but it's extremely low-paying and you don't have anywhere to go career-wise except if you wanted to start your own daycare or school or something, but that's a whole set of different skills and one I wouldn't advise to start at 50. Substitute teaching is a stop-gap but it can be a way to decide if you want to be a full-time teacher. The teacher resident program for people with a BA degree is a real career path that OP could start--if she at all thought she was cut out for teaching--as that's developing a profession and there's support in place to get licensed and they have benefits, time off etc. that many value. BUt it's a hard job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP -- would you qualify to be a school counselor? What would that take? Seems like a better job than being a teacher, and would have a better salary than a teacher's assistant. Less intense daily interaction with so many kids as a counselor.

Or maybe something administrative -- it really just depends on how much $$ you actually need. Is this the money you need to pay the mortgage, or just a job to start contributing to social security?

This is a licensed position that requires significant graduate work in school psychology.

What? A school psychologist and a school counselor are 2 different jobs with completely different training requirements. Most of you have no idea what you’re talking about. Please stick to commenting on your own profession.

[Anonymous]

OP was a sahm for the past how many decades, and is 50 years old. She is not going to get a job that pays more than $20/hr, even $20/hr will be lucky.

You can get a job as a receptionist at a small business that may pay $16 to $18/hour.

-52 yr old woman

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am surprised nobody suggested IT. Do a simple QA certification, plenty of centers in NoVa, will take 4-5 months and you can get a 60-70k job and most probably WFH. A fiend of mine just did this, she is 40 and had no prior work experience at all, now she has a 70k full WFH job. Something to think and research.

What is QA certification? Is it more like admin work? I always associate IT work with coding, which isn't for everyone, and you won't get good at it in a few months (unless you have natural inclination and talent for it). If it were easy then every idiot would apply, 70K remote after such short training sounds too good to be true without some connections..

QA is basically a tester.

Quality Assurance.

-someone in tech

A tester of what exactly that it doesn't require much skill or experience? Is this something related to consumer products interface testing? Or running scripts that someone else created and doing more of an admin job?

In my experience proper testing can be more complicated than writing code. Not only you need to understand what code does, you also have to have great analytical data skills to create test data sets and challenge the code to see if logic breaks. This is probably not the type of QA testing you are referring to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP -- would you qualify to be a school counselor? What would that take? Seems like a better job than being a teacher, and would have a better salary than a teacher's assistant. Less intense daily interaction with so many kids as a counselor.

Or maybe something administrative -- it really just depends on how much $$ you actually need. Is this the money you need to pay the mortgage, or just a job to start contributing to social security?

This is a licensed position that requires significant graduate work in school psychology.

What? A school psychologist and a school counselor are 2 different jobs with completely different training requirements. Most of you have no idea what you’re talking about. Please stick to commenting on your own profession.

https://onlinecounselingprograms.com/become-a-counselor/counseling-careers/school-counselor/#:~:text=High%20school%20counselors%20typically%20hold,state%2Dissued%20license%20to%20practice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP was a sahm for the past how many decades, and is 50 years old. She is not going to get a job that pays more than $20/hr, even $20/hr will be lucky.

You can get a job as a receptionist at a small business that may pay $16 to $18/hour.

-52 yr old woman

This is often what happens, our society is punitive towards women who choose to raise their kids themselves and prioritize family and home. If you don't marry well and secure a nice divorce package or something befalls your husband you are SOL. Even if you have a degree, it can't help you. You have to keep working and raising kids, and part time jobs aren't easy to find and not available for professional jobs until you are so well established that you can call your schedule or consult PT. no wonder younger women are deciding to stay childless more and more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP was a sahm for the past how many decades, and is 50 years old. She is not going to get a job that pays more than $20/hr, even $20/hr will be lucky.

You can get a job as a receptionist at a small business that may pay $16 to $18/hour.

-52 yr old woman

This is often what happens, our society is punitive towards women who choose to raise their kids themselves and prioritize family and home. If you don't marry well and secure a nice divorce package or something befalls your husband you are SOL. Even if you have a degree, it can't help you. You have to keep working and raising kids, and part time jobs aren't easy to find and not available for professional jobs until you are so well established that you can call your schedule or consult PT. no wonder younger women are deciding to stay childless more and more.

The solution is not to stay childless, it’s to not become a sahm. Keep working ladies, even if you have children!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am surprised nobody suggested IT. Do a simple QA certification, plenty of centers in NoVa, will take 4-5 months and you can get a 60-70k job and most probably WFH. A fiend of mine just did this, she is 40 and had no prior work experience at all, now she has a 70k full WFH job. Something to think and research.

What is QA certification? Is it more like admin work? I always associate IT work with coding, which isn't for everyone, and you won't get good at it in a few months (unless you have natural inclination and talent for it). If it were easy then every idiot would apply, 70K remote after such short training sounds too good to be true without some connections..

QA is basically a tester.

Quality Assurance.

-someone in tech

Also don't go to those tech job fairs. Some dumbass on here recommended it to me and they only wanted engineers.

oh, yea, no, QA testers don't get recruited at tech fairs. That was a dumb recommendation. You can look for those jobs online.

However, OP being a sahm for that many years with no tech background isn't getting a QA tester job.

She can.. My mother did this in her mid 50s. She took a course or more in a local community college and started working contracts. I think taking a course helped because this opens the doors to potential work, but This was a while ago, like 15-20 years ago? I forgot a lot of it. She was making something like 40-50/hr I believe.. don't remember much. I just remember she had to take SQL (data query language), and she got good at it quickly, so this allowed her to get more jobs and higher paying ones. She was in STEM before in her country, so tech stuff came easy to her, but she had zero experience in the field, she was waitressing prior to this job. Ironically waitressing paid a lot more with tips, but she couldn't physically do this anymore and didn't want to do low wage jobs either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP was a sahm for the past how many decades, and is 50 years old. She is not going to get a job that pays more than $20/hr, even $20/hr will be lucky.

You can get a job as a receptionist at a small business that may pay $16 to $18/hour.

-52 yr old woman

This is often what happens, our society is punitive towards women who choose to raise their kids themselves and prioritize family and home. If you don't marry well and secure a nice divorce package or something befalls your husband you are SOL. Even if you have a degree, it can't help you. You have to keep working and raising kids, and part time jobs aren't easy to find and not available for professional jobs until you are so well established that you can call your schedule or consult PT. no wonder younger women are deciding to stay childless more and more.

The solution is not to stay childless, it’s to not become a sahm. Keep working ladies, even if you have children!

The best is to have kids early when you have much more energy to work and have kids and are junior in your career and can exit and return, or you can work periodically. Taking 1-3 years off is often not nearly as detrimental to your career as taking 20 years off from the workplace. Once your kids are teens you can lean into your career

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP was a sahm for the past how many decades, and is 50 years old. She is not going to get a job that pays more than $20/hr, even $20/hr will be lucky.

You can get a job as a receptionist at a small business that may pay $16 to $18/hour.

-52 yr old woman

This is often what happens, our society is punitive towards women who choose to raise their kids themselves and prioritize family and home. If you don't marry well and secure a nice divorce package or something befalls your husband you are SOL. Even if you have a degree, it can't help you. You have to keep working and raising kids, and part time jobs aren't easy to find and not available for professional jobs until you are so well established that you can call your schedule or consult PT. no wonder younger women are deciding to stay childless more and more.

The solution is not to stay childless, it’s to not become a sahm. Keep working ladies, even if you have children!

The best is to have kids early when you have much more energy to work and have kids and are junior in your career and can exit and return, or you can work periodically. Taking 1-3 years off is often not nearly as detrimental to your career as taking 20 years off from the workplace. Once your kids are teens you can lean into your career

Unless your teen is the one in three who has seriously considered suicide. Then perhaps you should hold off on leaning in until you get their mental health sorted first.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0213-yrbs.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am surprised nobody suggested IT. Do a simple QA certification, plenty of centers in NoVa, will take 4-5 months and you can get a 60-70k job and most probably WFH. A fiend of mine just did this, she is 40 and had no prior work experience at all, now she has a 70k full WFH job. Something to think and research.

What is QA certification? Is it more like admin work? I always associate IT work with coding, which isn't for everyone, and you won't get good at it in a few months (unless you have natural inclination and talent for it). If it were easy then every idiot would apply, 70K remote after such short training sounds too good to be true without some connections..

QA is basically a tester.

Quality Assurance.

-someone in tech

A tester of what exactly that it doesn't require much skill or experience? Is this something related to consumer products interface testing? Or running scripts that someone else created and doing more of an admin job?

In my experience proper testing can be more complicated than writing code. Not only you need to understand what code does, you also have to have great analytical data skills to create test data sets and challenge the code to see if logic breaks. This is probably not the type of QA testing you are referring to.

Yea, I stated up thread, OP won't be able to get QA testing job in IT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am surprised nobody suggested IT. Do a simple QA certification, plenty of centers in NoVa, will take 4-5 months and you can get a 60-70k job and most probably WFH. A fiend of mine just did this, she is 40 and had no prior work experience at all, now she has a 70k full WFH job. Something to think and research.

What is QA certification? Is it more like admin work? I always associate IT work with coding, which isn't for everyone, and you won't get good at it in a few months (unless you have natural inclination and talent for it). If it were easy then every idiot would apply, 70K remote after such short training sounds too good to be true without some connections..

QA is basically a tester.

Quality Assurance.

-someone in tech

Also don't go to those tech job fairs. Some dumbass on here recommended it to me and they only wanted engineers.

oh, yea, no, QA testers don't get recruited at tech fairs. That was a dumb recommendation. You can look for those jobs online.

However, OP being a sahm for that many years with no tech background isn't getting a QA tester job.

She can.. My mother did this in her mid 50s. She took a course or more in a local community college and started working contracts. I think taking a course helped because this opens the doors to potential work, but This was a while ago, like 15-20 years ago? I forgot a lot of it. She was making something like 40-50/hr I believe.. don't remember much. I just remember she had to take SQL (data query language), and she got good at it quickly, so this allowed her to get more jobs and higher paying ones. She was in STEM before in her country, so tech stuff came easy to her, but she had zero experience in the field, she was waitressing prior to this job. Ironically waitressing paid a lot more with tips, but she couldn't physically do this anymore and didn't want to do low wage jobs either.

That's not going to happen for OP, who is a sahm and has no background in tech. Also, back then, companies were desperate for IT people as there were not enough of them. Today, the market is flooded with low level IT folks, many of whom are on Hlbs.

I also took sql programming classes in cc, 25 years ago, and found a job in tech. But, it would be really hard to break into it now as a 50 year old with zero background in the field.

[Anonymous]

OP, where are you?

If you’re in Fairfax County, let me know.

53, former SAHM who has a great career.