If you could retrain in any career, what would you do for a living and why?

Question

If you could retrain in any career, what would you do for a living and why?

3 Answers

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Answer 1

If I could hit restart, I'd probably want to retrain as a surgeon. If I had to pick a speciality - I think I'd go for something "glamorous" like a neurosurgeon or a trauma surgeon.

There are several aspects of being a surgeon I'd enjoy, but most of all I'd relish the idea of having a positive impact on people every single day.

Why I'd retrain to be a surgeon

Although the high stress work-environment might deter some people, I'd love to come to work every morning knowing that I could be saving someone's life or improving their quality of life dramatically.

I'd also enjoy the status, salary, and sense of achievement that being a surgeon would entail.

If I worked at a hospital that was close to the center of town, I'd also have a pretty sweet free parking space too!

Answer 2

I always fancied that I could be a tree surgeon.

If there was some sort of apocalypse that made my career in the IT industry redundant, then I could see myself retraining in tree surgery to a professional level. At an amateur level I enjoy lopping and chopping branches, and really like the great outdoors. Being a bit apprehensive of heights, I think that I would be suitably cautious when climbing trees full-time, but without suffering from the 'fear factor' that this sort of work would induce in a lot of people.

Not only would this be a great outdoors job, it would also require a fair amount of common sense and independent thinking. I don't think that it is the sort of work that I would tire of mentally, as every job would pose its own unique problems to be resolved through logistics and some sensible planning.

Doing this sort of physically intensive work could prove to be too much for me, though, and I would be particularly upset if it affected my ability to enjoy my primary leisure pursuit of cycling and cycle racing.

Answer 3

I've already re-trained several times - having already been a dancer, teacher, designer and political aide - and I'm now a writer and editor, so changing direction is familiar territory for me!

I think, if I were ever to re-train again, though, I'd want to become a forensic pathologist (if I could overcome my squeamishness).

This is partly because my daughter, who's a biologist, is so good at making science sound exciting, that she's somehow managed to make me interested in it too - which is no mean feat, as I hated science when I was at school.

She's helped me to realise that creatives and scientists have a lot in common, including an ability to look at the world around them in a different way to others, and to question everything they see.

An added benefit of becoming a forensic pathologist would be that I could then use my real-life experience to write convincing crime novels. Or maybe I could become a private investigator, and the main character of my books...

I wonder how you train to do that? Anyone got any idea?