Notes on Teaching Yourself
One man's quest to finish a single Udemy course he bought earlier in the year
Posted 16th February 2025
Posted 16th February 2025
I've been wanting to change my career for a while now. I work in finances, and this has been my intention for a job for most of my life. It's not that I've had an interest in the financial sector, or even that I know much about it even, but I've always been good at maths and not quite good enoguh at my other talents to make a living from them, which I'd imagine is a fairly common experience for academically talented people who were also creative. I don't find it particularly fulfilling, but I'm happy enough working there and the position pays me, so I've relatively few complaints.
As I've worked in this particular branch of the field for the last 3 years, however I have noticed that no one tends to move very much. There's a lot of sideways movement, from team to team or from one sector to another, but the people who I'm working with now all seem to be in about the same position that they were in a few years ago. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course - it's a damn solid indicator of job security, and it shows that the work is steady enough and stable enough that no one's keen to get shift. But I remember having a conversation about it with one of the other team members at a Christmas gettogether that my company threw, and it's really stuck with me since then.
She said that there's no future in my sector. I nodded along at the time as she told me about what she's seen with other parts of the finance department, saying about different teams being introduced or managers coming and going as she's been here, even chatting about other teams that she reckons would be good to join. But that specific phrase is what sort of rings in my head now and then, when i'm in a weekly meeting or chatting to my boss about so and so department doing whatever the new process they've been told to do. There's no future in it.
As such, I've been looking into using the skills I've gotten to move away from my current sector and into somewhere related but slightly less future-less (hopefully).