Transferable skills from IT

[Networkgeek]

Hi guys

I've been working in the IT industry for a smidgen over 10 years now. I started keen as a bean, I could not get enough of fixing computers, then servers and now networks. However, lockdown presented an interesting opportunity to stop and rethink my life decisions, I have come to realise that I can't spend another 5/10 years doing this work. It honestly bores me to tears and every morning I dread looking at Outlook and Teams. I truly hate what I do now.

I have to get out, but I really don't want to start at the bottom of the pay scale again. I have thought about going into tree surgery, as I'm an outdoorsy person anyway and I climb a lot as a hobby. Plus who doesn't enjoy working with power tools! However, I have very few transferable skills to this industry, skills which have taken years to develop in my career.

So, I thought I'd ask here to find out what others have done when leaving their industry? Did you go completely to the opposite end of the spectrum of what you were doing? Or, did you choose an industry that had similarities?

I don't really want to stay within the technology industry, as I honestly do not give a toss about it anymore. I don't care about security patches, I don't care about Windows 11, I don't care about any of it. I feel like I'm on the verge of a career breakdown and I'd rather get out before that happens.

Thanks all

[Brother D]

Lots of friends have gone from IT into PM roles and seem to enjoy it (well the $600 per day helps).
What was your degree in? I know a couple with engineering degrees who went on to be pilots.
Need to be honest and identify what do you actually like doing. If you are one of the rare out-going IT types then pre-sales has an almost infinite upside to pay.
Self-employed route? Two of the guys I went to Uni now both run their own very sucessful IT companies, one doing patching/wiring installs and the other has a wireless install business.

[Zumbruk]

How about one of the specialisms in IT, e.g., IT Security?

[DiscoSINGH]

Try and get into IT governance - you won't be bored

[OverSteery]

DiscoSINGH said:

Try and get into IT governance - you won't be bored

Sarcasm I assume?

[hyphen]

IT sales/after sales?

[clockworks]

I stumbled into IT by accident in 1977 at the age of 20. I did 10 years in rework facilities (updating mainframes and peripherals before they went out on lease again, and then banking terminals), before moving into a field role for banking and retail customers.
At the age of 52, I'd had enough. The job was mostly box-swapping and a lot of driving.

I took voluntary redundancy, took my pensions, and started my own business repairing clocks.
While the business was growing, I also had a part time supermarket job. Gave that up 3 years ago, now working for myself full time.

Getting a decent redundancy package was the key, basically enough money to live off for 2 years if the worst happened.

[DWDarkWheels]

I hear ya. I lost all interest when "The Cloud"/Sharepoint/Teams came along.

No transferrable skills you say? Put technical skills to one side and think of the soft-skills :
The ability to quickly grasp and learn new technologies and concepts;
The ability to understand what non-technical customers/users are telling you and turn this into successful solutions to meet their needs;
The ability to troubleshoot problems and know how and when to escalate these to management/other internal teams/vendors;
The ability to manage and prioritise workloads.

You get the drift.

[rog007]

Just retrain as a tree surgeon? Job done!

[StevieBee]

This will depend upon your propensity for challenge and travel but you might want to take a look at the whole Smart Cities thing.

If you are not familiar with it, it's a global initiative that is seeking to make cities smarter and thus more efficient - operationally, financially, environmentally, socially, etc... using tech, a bit of Ai and IT to link everything together. It's a huge market and growing.

It crosses occasionally with my work and what I see is urgent demand for leadership skills in the lower and middle income type regions. They've no end of IT experts who can write code or fix something but they lack those with the insights necessary to determine what that code or something should actually be doing and for what purpose.

[Jiebo]

Business to business sales would be my suggestion. I know some people in their mid 30s pulling in over 200k as the deals are massive. It doesn’t seem to be ‘sales’ in the traditional slimy way, as the people I know who do it aren’t what anyone would call born salesman.