The wife and I are getting older. We have been working for decades at this point. But we are too young to retire, and we had kids late. But one of us could totally switch over to a lower stress second career. Ideally something with benefits, maybe even a chance to get a pension. And since we still have kids, needs to be flexible. One of our kids has autism, so lots of random doctors appointment and stuff.
We both work with computers all day. What are some good options for a second career that doesn’t need to have long term growth potential. We have 8 years where ideally both of us are working so we can cover each other with benefits if something happens. After that, the kids are out of high school at least. So it isn’t like it would be a “short” term career/job. Just not a 30 year thing. And ideally, something that could at least partially be done at home.
All of these problems are fairly unique to the US government. I work for the Canadian government and none of that was a problem for me.
Apart from IT jobs, public sector pay is competitive with private. Depending on how much you value the pension and benefits, you could even say the IT jobs are competitive.
People openly talk about their drug use around the water cooler. There’s literally no stigma at all unless someone starts talking about how much meth and crack they did last weekend. But like weed is super normal to hear about and I’ve even heard someone talk about using mushrooms before.
I had to do a simple police background check to get my job. No DNA.
I never had to tell them about my hobbies.
I didn’t have to grease any hands for a promotion. Promotions are unfortunately mostly based on seniority, but in the right place they can be based on merit too. But there are lots of diagonal advancement opportunities, jumping around within your dept or between depts is totally viable. There can be a bit of a glass ceiling if you aren’t bilingual, but there is free training offered to learn French to help with advancement. On top of that, our union contracts guarantee pay raises every year even in the same position.
Only the US government ever randomly shuts down because your country has this dumb feature where Congress can play chicken with the funds for public sector jobs. In most countries that’s not a thing.