So I think I need to look into a career change.
I'm pretty good at running homeless shelters. I've written policy, designed emergency shelters from the ground up, led large staff. I was pretty good.
But then I burned out hard. So I ended up quitting in a way that didn't leave such great impressions among the muckymucks. Still had tons of solid experience, but not the connections I'd need to just start managing a whole shelter again. So when I came back to work, it was on the ground level.
I was always pretty good at maintaining a safe shelter space and deescalating conflicts. It's how I built my career. But shelter work has changed a lot locally in the last few years. You aren't shelter staff anymore, tasked with keeping the milieu safe and secure and running smoothly, dealing with conflicts or emergencies when they happen. You're case managers. You have a case load that you need to meet with regularly to work on their individualized goals. It's very personal, with lots of mandatory meetings and goal setting and figuring out how to inspire these people into taking action on their goals.
I am a dogshit case manager. I struggle with one-on-one meetings.
It's the autism, I think. My skills are very good for administration, but I don't read emotions good and constantly fumble my words and I'm sure some of my clients think I'm stupid. And being told "this is your client, their problems are now your problems" is a lot harder than the team-based approach I'm used to. Some of my clients very obviously don't like me, and I can't tell if it's because they're just grumpy or if I've done something wrong or if it's just cause I'm trans.
I've considered looking for more admin-based jobs at other nonprofits, but I'm also not great at looking professional. Cool thing about shelter work - you can come to work in jeans and a boymoder hoodie and still be considered a credible professional. Fancy clothes are for when the governor visits. Having to regularly dress up for work would be an adjustment.
I've also thought about trying something completely different and maybe less people-focused. I've been getting into CAD a lot recently and like to build things - maybe I could learn how to do steel fabrication or something? I don't even know where I'd begin with that - what jobs exist or what education I need. I can turn technical drawings into 3d models, but I'm sure they want a lot more than that. I'm just a hobbyist, maybe I make a website as a portfolio with my more presentable projects or something?
All this rambling to say, does anyone have experience completely changing careers? What did you do and how did you do it? Am I trapped in a cycle of having a mental health crisis every couple years cause I see too many overdoses and shit?
yeah. i used to be a cubicle guy doing phone-based helpdesk/telecommunications support. from like teenager until late 20s. then i went into seasonal agricultural worker for a few years. meaning, instead of speaking to like 50-80 people every day, some of them very toxic and in distress, while maintaining a professional demeanor and solving their problems, i was just interacting with plants and animals, maybe while having a long personal conversation with another worker, or maybe totally on my own quietly. it was extremely therapeutic, but the pay was absolute dogshit. sub-minimum wage, illegal housing, no healthcare/benefits, no overtime pay for 60+ hour weeks. i loved being outdoors and ate pretty healthy and, in general grew much stronger with tons of stamina and felt great, physically.
eventually, after running out of options for escaping material precarity, i went back to school to get a B.S. in agricultural sciences and started doing kind of community organizing and informal adult education in ag sciences. because while those jobs don't pay great, there is relative material security. like i'm not worried about food or housing and i can travel sometimes, which is awesome. but, again, it was another role shift. now i do a lot of meetings, relationship management, public speaking, and curriculum/resource development. i would rather just be in a field working with plants and animals again, but this is OK. it doesn't feel meaningless like my first career and i like being able to be creative with visual resources and video production.
in short, the necessity of my material situation forced me to adapt to something new. which, as i grew into myself in my 30s, became more feasible. i think we are often more capable of change and learning new ways of being than we assume and if you feel like a role is actively shortening your life or detrimental to your health, you should seriously consider trying something different. in the non-profit sector of what i like to call "giving a shit when it's not your turn", people are always burning out, moving elsewhere, re-entering. i think you'll always be able to go back to that if you want down the line, and likely the soft skills you've picked up already would be invaluable elsewhere. and, hell, there's always a chance you'll find some weird, interesting synthesis of multiple roles.
Factory work, especially CAD, is long hours, and mostly solitary. Pay is pretty good, though. That being said, factory work varies from place to place and firm to firm. Some are legacy boy's clubs with a rotating caste of the local cast-offs as they get shuffled from one badly managed factory to another, others are well oiled but run by absolute workaholics union shops, and others are fancy button pressing factories where the pace is almost so slow as to be exhausting in its own right. And alot are somewhere in-between.
It's not a terrible career choice, and you will probably be working alongside some of your former clients (or that type of person). That being said, being close to the production process will really make you want to redact the bourgeoisie, because they pay you absolutely nothing compared to how much product you put out. For some jobs, 15 minutes of full rate is enough to cover your labor costs, 4 hours covers everyone else's labor and material costs and then you still have 8 more hours that are just making money for the the people in charge.
Retail itself is a criminal monopolistic enterprise.
I know you say you're not good at professional, but your skill set sounds like it would be pretty high demand at, say, Medicine sans frontiers, especially if you speak another language.
Pretty much every city/county has several homeless outreach positions/programs. Government job benefits and pay are about double what non profits pay to their support staff by comparison. Applications are usually weighed by experience more than degree.
I changed careers after a decade in education (burn out) and it took about 3 years to get back to a comparable income. I had to start at low level office support and use that experience to transfer to a higher paid/more responsibility position. Overall, I'm happy with the work-life balance despite the job not being as rewarding
I haven't looked much into government jobs out of fear that since I'm not already a government employee or a veteran I'd never stand a chance. Also I've already had a little too much face time with the local government organization that handles homelessness. Some of those people really don't like me.
I should give it a shot though, see what's available. Thanks for the perspective.
