Originally Posted by
Flocks
If you are really unhappy in your job, do a career change...
The older one gets and the more “life” taken on, like a family requiring you to “bring home the bacon”, the more difficult radical career change becomes. Consequences of errors become more seismic with age due to less recovery time before retirement.
If one is young, energetic and footloose such changes are much easier and more practical. But even then there’s no guarantee one won’t end up in yet another line of work he finds soul killing. Grandpa always said, “Ya don’t know it ’til ya live it.”.
People sometimes take confidence in a non-aviation educational credential as a safety net. That too seems to have diminishing utility with the passage of years.
In my salad days with a US legacy, I’d often fly with captains who’d say something akin to, “If I couldn’t make this kind of money flying I’d earn it elsewhere because I’ve got a degree in XXXX engineering from Super Tech University.”.
Problem with that was it was an undergrad degree, they never worked a day in the field, the last time they worked an engineering problem it was on a slide rule, they had no contacts or continuing education in the field…and might not have earned what they thought they could.
I certainly can’t make a case against more education but think its utility is inversely proportional to the passage of time.
I respect those who have the guts to take the big step of abandoning aviation if they feel they’ll be better off by some measure. There are surely examples of success doing that.
It seems the BA pilot isn’t a career changer but rather an employer changer.
The guy in my OP actually hung up his wings. I wonder if we’ll see a future post saying he’s reconsidered and is plotting reentry.
