Let me start at the beginning as I am 36 years old now and have a large chunk of my career behind me. All my life I worked in advertising and TV production, I had a fabulous time, lots of fun, even more stress. I met some wonderful friends and some real evil egos with daily tantrums which would put a three year old to shame. It was all going smoothly, I hopped from one exciting company to another, mainly by being headhunted - career progression without having to look for a job? Fantastic!
Then husband and I decided to have a baby and I spent a blissful year on maternity leave and every day I thought less and less about getting up at 5.00am to go and shoot another annoying commercial. All those exciting abroad shoots in exotic locations became less tempting (the reality is spending days working round the clock in a hotel room trying to catch everyone's time zone while fighting a horrid jet lag/not seeing a bit of the city you visit/coming home run down and exhausted). All the diva directors demanding to cast a dog which looks like a famous human film star faded away. The irritating creatives bollocking poor runner for failing to bring them salad with extra chia seeds became a thing of the past. The time has come to leave it all behind and relax.
I spent another year playing with my toddler, introducing him to all the museums London has to offer, hanging out with friends and doing my driver's license. Then I started to think about changing my career. At first I thought about getting any admin job that would give me decent working hours and a lot of holidays. I had a couple of interviews, got one job, didn't take it - the salary vs childcare cost is a real bugger. I toyed with setting up an online vintage shop, wasted months, gave up on the said idea. Started to look for a job again, a very tedious task. Came to the conclusion that admin is:
a) boring
b) limiting
c) badly paid
What I wanted was a new path with a clear career progression plan, a profession, good money, being able to work from home, decent working hours and good benefits. Then I started to think what part of my experience I enjoyed most and came to the conclusion that it was the budgeting, costing, making money, looking at numbers. Needless to say Accountancy was the answer.
I am a 36 year old accountancy student and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
