I have no idea where to take my “career”…

April 11, 2023 8:37 PM

I feel so lost in my work life. I feel my degree isn’t worth very much, not sure what I even want to do now. I really disliked customer service, but I do feel office work is a good fit for me realistically, as I am introverted, shy, and INFP and 4w5 but more organized and detail oriented than those types usually are.

I am not sure what kind of role to pursue next?

My career history is as follows:
Remote administrative support 2021-present
Corporate customer service representative 2019-2020
Corporate customer service assistant 2016-2019
Coffee shop team member 2013-2016
Sandwich shop shift manager 2010-2013
Sandwich shop employee 2009-2010

Education history:
BA in Communications, 2018-2020
-Studied PR, marketing, and advertising mainly
AA in General Transfer Studies, 2011-2014

I have experience with Microsoft Office of course (Excel, Outlook, Word, Teams, PowerPoint), SAP ERP, and AS400. In my current role, my company is a partner to another client business, and my team helps out their distribution planners by creating and tracking orders in SAP. I create orders to ask the plants to treat and pack the seeds, then create orders to ask the plants to ship them. I resolve all costing and master data issues in the process.

I really need to make more money, I am making $44K and having a hard time making ends meet and need to pay back $22K in student loans. I currently live alone with $1,200 biweekly paychecks and my rent is $945. I want to get a second job but also a new role, but I have no idea what to pursue; supply chain, logistics, a more communications type role (where I’ll probably start at the very bottom making about what I make now?)

My strengths at work have always been that I am very detail oriented, accurate, and organized. I really see work as a way to make money and not to fulfill me. I just need to pay the bills. I just moved in November to this one bedroom apartment, but am struggling. I have a boyfriend of one year but we haven’t talked of moving in together yet, he is currently living with his parents to pay off student debt. My lease is up in July (and then will renew for one year and expire each July). I feel like a complete failure in life.

posted by anon1129 to Work & Money (17 answers total)

Have you thought of pursuing a career in research? You could be a project manager, coordinate activities, track client deliverables, write summaries of other research work, etc. And at the right company, you could grow in your skills and have a career path, which would put you on a track for salary growth over time.
posted by OrangeDisk at 9:19 PM on April 11, 2023

You might also want to look at admin roles in local, county or state government (depending on the location).
posted by brookeb at 10:59 PM on April 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Learn bookkeeping. It would suit you.
posted by Jacqueline at 11:46 PM on April 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

Look for job openings, any job openings, in city-state-federal government offices. You get plugged into a very straightforward path of advancement in most roles, and exposure to other related job openings that might be lateral moves or advances that expose you to new skills. Government work tends toward the admin/bureaucratic parts of the work spectrum, and depending on the agency employing you there can be funds available to you for loan forgiveness and additional training to keep your career moving.

It's worth exploring avenues to disconnect the bulk of what you're asking from the last statement in your question. You don't need your job trajectory to answer your need for meaning, so you can do some work to disconnect how you value yourself from your work and rent woes. Jonathan Haidt's "Happiness Hypothesis" might be a timely read for you.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 12:51 AM on April 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

First off, you have a degree, a job, a partner, and are living in your own apartment. You are winning at life! Not at all a failure. It does sound like office work suits you and you'd be good at it. Are there any opportunities at your current company that would pay more than you current job, like in another department (HR, billing/accounts, IT, etc)? Government is another sector work looking into- starting pay isn't great but typically once you're in there's lots of opportunity for advancement and good benefits. Or any large company - they all have processes and projects and need people with good organizational skills to run them.
posted by emd3737 at 2:59 AM on April 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Virtual assistant work or copywriting plus living outside the US where costs are lower might be something to consider.

If that sounds at all intriguing, I’m connected with a lovely group of digital nomads who’d be happy to guide you along the path. Feel free to PM me.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 3:23 AM on April 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed. Per the Ask Metafilter Content Policy, please "address the main question being asked" and avoid " chastising the asker".
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:09 AM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would stop worrying about building a whole career and just focus on the next step. Start applying for everything that looks like a good fit with your skills. You don’t have to pick logistics or communication, just start getting your resume out there and see where you get interest.

The reality is most people shift careers a few times in their lives anyway. So for now just focus on getting the next gig that meets your needs.

As a fellow 4, the self talk around “I’m a failure” is so familiar to me. Try to turn the volume down on that and understand that you’re starting our, and this is what starting out looks like.
posted by jeoc at 5:27 AM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Your skills sound very transferable so I might suggest you focus on the industry you want to be in and then research (read job openings, career pages, information interviews, etc.) to get a sense of the various roles, there may be quite a few roles that would work for you but aren't well known/obvious jobs. For example at my last employer (tech) "Product operations" and "Technical project manager" were both roles that folks from customer service with skills such as your strengths migrated to. If you are interested in software at all, a role in QA might work for you, again that's an area where attention to detail and being accurate is very important.
posted by snowymorninblues at 6:50 AM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have no idea what to pursue; supply chain, logistics

You can actually pursue all kinds of things and see which one gives you a job and go from there. I will say I work in business software implementation and all of my customers who have more complex inventory movement have one or more yous doing what you do and I am pretty certain they're making well over 44K. The problem is none of them have a standardized title or even a title that sticks in my brain as an example - I think they're often buried under vague words in the neighborhood of purchasing, inventory, warehouse, buyer, operations.

I suggest you get a tidy version of your resume up on Indeed, make sure you're hitting those keywords around SAP and AS400, any other specialized software you use, any EDI experience. See who bites. Do some searches on those keywords too, to see what kind of jobs are out there AND how they word their job descriptions. As you find things that sound appealing to you, reword your resume to be more like that.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:00 AM on April 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

May I also suggest making sure that you are on the best income-based repayment plan for your (federal) student loans before repayment starts up again?
posted by praemunire at 7:21 AM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

The government types of jobs as mentioned above may have the best benefits. Another option is office manager in a small company where you have many roles (accounting, payroll, HR, event planning, maybe contract writing). I did terrible low-pay office work (mainly temp - not recommended except as a stopgap) for years before I found a job like this at a small construction company.

Office manager pay may start in the 40s but 60s or 70s is possible. (My degrees are in English but I've been doing mostly accounting for nearly 2 decades. This company does have an outside accountant.) Bonus to a small construction company: very casual office and I bring my dogs to work.
posted by Glinn at 8:02 AM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't know what any of those personality type things mean, but organized and detail oriented with office skills screams paralegal to me. And those folks can make great money! With your degrees you likely don't need it, but you might consider a paralegal certificate course. They're usually about 6 weeks, and may be subsidized at your local community college. Some employers will also pay for them.
posted by decathecting at 8:15 AM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

You get plugged into a very straightforward path of advancement in most roles, and exposure to other related job openings that might be lateral moves or advances that expose you to new skills.

I wanted to emphasize this, since it sounds like you may feel you're having trouble negotiating the more indeterminate and socially-challenging expectations of today's job market. Obviously we're talking about a wide range of jobs here, but generally government employment for worker bees tends to be a lot more like GM in the 50s (without the discrimination): they hire you from a public announcement, they train you, there's a clear, if somewhat constrained, progression of increased responsibility and pay, and at the end, you get a pension!

Take a look at usajobs.gov. (But before you submit any resumes over there, also visit the usajobs reddit; for most admin jobs, resumes have to be drafted a certain way to tick the boxes of automated resume review.)
posted by praemunire at 8:54 AM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd research organizations that are good to work for in your area and strategize how to make contacts / get a job at them. I thrive in bureaucracy, so government or large organizations are good for me. I worked for a large non-profit healthcare provider in the past, and they tend to pay well and also happened to have a heavily unionized workforce, which drove a reasonable working culture.
posted by momus_window at 8:58 AM on April 12, 2023

100% agree with everyone who is suggesting government work, especially at the municipal level. If you get in and you are a hard worker who is willing to learn new things, you will have a path to promotion and a job for life. You'll also be eligible for public service loan forgiveness, which could ease the stretch of your loans. The paralegals who have worked for me both ended up making in the high 60s or 70s before they retired.
posted by notjustthefish at 9:27 AM on April 12, 2023

Response by poster: Thank you everyone, I really appreciate your tips, I feel like I have some good directions to look into, which I will do tonight. I currently work remotely, and I’m sure I save a lot of gas because of that. My partner lives an hour away and if we were to move in together, I would be moving in with him, he lives in a small town of 2,000 and most people commute to my area for work… so I will be trying to decide if I want to stay remote. There are pluses and minuses.
posted by anon1129 at 11:39 AM on April 12, 2023 [1 favorite]