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My Career Timeline – Part 2

Written by Mandy

1990 – 2003.

So I left school and became a Dental Nurse, and I had my 1st experience of seeing how self employment worked – Dentists in England are classed as self employed. The thought of being your own boss definitely appealed to me, although the Dentist I worked for did not recommend it and said I should never do it. But I kept the thought at the back of my mind anyway. Although I never had any intention of becoming a Dental Nurse I did enjoy the job, all my experiences and the people I met. I was a Dental Nurse for 10 years and I gave it 100%, became qualified and managed to get experience in a lot of areas including General Anaesthetic and Oral Surgery. Having to deal with people going through different emotions, like pain and fear and dealing with it well gave me a huge confidence boost.

Could I Retrain?

But I still had nagging feelings that I should take another look at what I should do for a job. Should I try and change my career and how difficult would that be, would I be able to retrain in a different area completely? I decided to sit down and write what I enjoyed doing, to see if I could get a job in that area, I came up with the usual suspects:

Art
Photography
ComputersSo I went to night school and enrolled on a course that I found that covered all 3. It was Apple Mac Training in Quark, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Computers and technology had moved on hugely since I had left school and there was a lot of courses on offer. This course suited me down to the ground. I really enjoyed it, and although it was hard to work and find time to study (I had to take holidays to be able to attend the lessons) what I was learning was extremely rewarding. It was so easy to manipulate the photos and create whatever image or illustration I wanted, it really fulfilled my creative side and what I wanted to do.

I Changed my Career Path

I qualified and I was lucky enough in 2000 to be able to get a job in an Advertising Agency, creating recruitment adverts for various clients. This was a huge step, I had never done anything like this before, it was a complete change and everything was new to me. I wanted to be successful at it, so I grabbed the bull by both horns so to speak and went for it. It paid off I did really well and was soon promoted to team leader and sent to visit clients and attend presentations, learning more about the business side of things. I also learned how bigger companies worked and interacted, (not always well!) I was proud of the fact that I had adapted so well from Dental Nursing to the Advertising Agency.

I still had this nagging thought at the back of my mind about working for myself, but I always put it off because the market was already flooded with Graphic Designers, and I worried about the competition, and not being able to make an impression on it. The only down side to the Agency job or Graphic Design was the hours, they could be erratic and long, but that didn’t bother me too much because it was just me and my husband. I was then offered a promotion that would have meant even worse hours and less job security. But I hesitated to accept it, what if we had children that could be a very different story? And we did want children, would I have to choose between my career and a family, how would we fit it all in?

Did we have kids? Find out more in part 3!

Mandy

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