I grew up on a small family farm in southwest Western Australia, both my parents are university educated and expected me to go to uni, but as the oldest son I was also expected to take over the farm.

Did okay in high school, wasn’t all that dedicated of a student. I was accepted into a double degree studying environmental biology and cultural anthropology, because why, not the point was to get an education, not a job. I did fairly well at school but I struggled to get a part time job as a shy 18 year old, I couldn’t get student allowance as I was technically part owner of several million dollars of land through a family trust, and my parents couldn’t support me because of a couple of bad seasons and anyway it’s a pretty asset rich/cash poor business.

Because I liked science I applied for a job as a lab tech at a winery, failed to get that but the offered me a job as a cellar hand and I spent 4 months working 12h shifts. Left that job with more cash in my pocket than I’ve ever had before so I spent the rest of that year travelling around Australia and then Europe.

Running out of money I came back to Australia, I had a friend who was washing dishes at Ayers Rock resort, I joined him. Someone in HR noticed on my resume that I had a truck license and forklift ticket and I was promoted to delivering in-flight catering to the airport. Got sick of the bosses nonsense so a girl I was seeing got me a job doing stargazing tours, spent the next several years in various tourism jobs.

Decided at that point I might as well get that education I was wanting. I enrolled in a double degree again, this time in Economics and International Development, it turns out International Development is code for tedious human geography so I changed to Political Science. During my final year a friend of mine was applying for medicine, I thought that sounded interesting, decided to sit the entrance exam and drop economics as I didn’t want maths heavy, complex Econ to tank my GPA.

Didn’t get into my first choice of med school so moved across the country to study, wound up in the rural and remote medicine track. After doing my hospital time I started working in general practice, I found the culture of GP so disgustingly focussed on manipulating Medicare that patient care took a back seat, also on one occasion I was told I needed to start charging a patient a bigger rate because “having patients like that in the waiting room isn’t a good look”.

I decided to leave GP and return to the public hospital system, a mentor of mine thought that’d be a shame and found a small town practice owned by portly British West country ex-navy surgeon who described himself as a cloth cap socialist. I obviously took that job.

He sold the practice a couple of years later, the new owner is as penny pinching and money grubbing as my first GP employer but I now have the confidence to stand up for my patients, I also now know that management telling individual doctors how to bill is considered price fixing by the ACCC. I also have enough experience and reputation within the community that it is best impossible for them to get rid of me.

I probably would have been happy as a farmer, or as a medical specialist or a surgeon although the training might’ve killed me(at the time it was common for surgical trainees to work 24h shifts). As it is I don’t my time between chronic diseases, preventative care, palliation, paediatrics, mental health, and emergency. I can’t imagine a better place to end up.

I would recommend leaving on a good note. Over half of my jobs were recommended to me by people I worked with in the past.

(Engineer, for reference.)

Loved legos as a kid. I guess that kind of showed where I was going, huh? Also got lucky that my high school still had design and tech-related electives, so I got a leg up on that before I even hit college.

Worked in a tool & die shop for a small company while I was in college. It was a rough job - small business operating on the razor’s edge - but it was a good introduction to real-world manufacturing processes and environments. Having to actually machine and assemble stuff by hand taught me more about designing for manufacturability than any course ever could, and I think every engineer should spend some time making things before they try and design them. Definitely wouldn’t call that particular business enjoyable, though.

Got my first real engineering position at a power generating company. Interesting place. Burned literal turns of garbage to generate power and recycle almost anything they could. Very safety-focused. Honestly, if the commute hadn’t been absolutely awful, I might have stuck it out with them longer, but “spend two hours of your day driving” was just terrible.

Then found my current position, which is as an engineer at a smaller high-tech company in aerospace. Hours are great, co-workers are fantastic, the job is interesting, I like my boss, pay and benefits are absolute dogshit.

The engineering field is definitely one of those where you’re “encouraged” to shop around and switch jobs every few years. I don’t know why. It’s terrible. Terrible for employees and terrible for businesses, who are perpetually losing institutional knowledge. I don’t know why they don’t fix this. I’m coming up on the point where I’m going to have to choose between “a comfortable job” and “a well-paying job”, and I don’t know what I’ll do.

Fast food, waiting tables, short cook, metal fab, school jobs, temp jobs, procurement, procurement analyst, business analyst, designated smart guy.

Most of the jobs were appropriate for the time in my life. Seek people you like working with and a boss who cares.

Airline pilot.

Sucked at school. Lousy student. Poor grades. But loved planes.

Sucked all the way through high school, even though I took an aviation intro course available at the school. Still loved planes, but liked mechanical stuff too.

Directionless at community college. Couldn’t find anything to hold my interest. Wasted a year.

Worked some odd jobs, picked up a steady, boring job that paid shit. Knew this wasn’t going to work long-term. Knew I liked working with my hands, so went to a vo-tech and aced it. Loved mechanical stuff, made the best GPA I’ve ever had. Honor roll, etc., got certifications for mechanical stuff, etc.

Decided to take a shot at flight school as a Hail Mary, and got accepted at a good college program (degrees were required at the time to get an airline job, not anymore today). Got all my ratings including instructor ratings and an aviation degree. The aviation degree was stupid because as soon as I got my first job the degree was useless, you’ve got nothing to fall back on like if you’d have gotten a business degree or an IT focused degree.

Took a few years of being an instructor pilot to get enough experience to land an ok regional pilot gig, and almost 20 years total to get a “real” airline job thanks to 9-11 and other economic downturns.

Basically poverty wages for my first 18 years of aviation career. Food stamp poverty level for over a decade.

Lessons learned: just because you’re a shitty student doesn’t mean you can’t find success. It won’t be a straight line for lots of us.

Grades do matter. If I hadn’t done well in the vo-tech program I wouldn’t have been accepted in the good school.

Spread out your options. Get a major in digital art? Get a solid minor in business admin. You can be a manager anywhere, and having the business degree will help you not get screwed by people trying to underbid your work or leech off you for your “exposure.”

If you have shot at success (whatever that is to you), sometimes it takes a really long time. I thought about leaving the job field many times. It sucked many different ways. Out of all the 29 people I started my “class” with at my first small regional job there were only 5 of us left after 15 years. People quit, left the field, had families, tried other aviation jobs. Some succeeded. Some didn’t.

Today’s aviation is different that it was when I started. I think things are slowing down, but the low pay I started with ($1k/mo as an instructor, $12/hr as a turboprop pilot (note - you got paid by the flight hour, 60-80 hours a month)) has been reversed and people get paid more as a new hire than I did after flying 15 years. The industry you work for today will change a lot over time, FBFW.

I’m still reeling from the decades of shit pay. Looking from the outside I should be pretty well off, but I’m cramming money into retirement accounts as fast as I can because this job has a mandatory retirement age, so I have to make up for all the money I didn’t have available to put into retirement and the fact that I’ll be out of a job sooner than I think. IOW, far less discretionary money. (Another lesson, save your money in a good retirement account ASAP.) I’d be a cash millionaire and then some if I’d had the money to save over the last couple decades. So we live in an older home in a cheaper area with decade+ old cars that are near or past the 6-figure milage mark. Not the more Upper-middle class life you’d expect from someone in a major airline making decent money.

Best part? I get to fly planes all over the country and now a larger part of the world. Worst part? Took a long time and being poor to get here.

Tried to GED in 10th grade. Weasled through the rest of high school making deals with teachers to just take final exams. 3 years of linguistics studies in college with no clue where that was headed. Boyfriend, pregnant, married, and random jobs as we moved to different states for his job. Burned my arm and had to go to physical therapy. Stoned on painkillers and amazed by how cool the gym was, i applied to therapy school. Now i work with school kids with physical disabilities. I’m in my car driving from school to school most days and my summers are free. I love that i have an office but don’t have to go there, i get to go outside and see the sun every day, each day is different, i get to work with/on some cool equipment, and working with kids is better than working with adults. I hate my special ed leadership team because they’re selfish, disrespectful assholes who care more about moving up than taking care of our school kids. If i had to do it over, i would change nothing. I would have been to immature to do this job and appreciate it as a younger person.

• Hischool dropout
• Repeatedly try this school thing again without much success. Learnt some electronics, though.
• Spent a few years picking up temp jobs while I tended to my hobbies. Linux and electronics, mostly. Some programming.
• Broke as fuck, desperate for a stable paycheck
• Started applying to anything that seemed vaguely interesting
• “WTF is offshore seismic survey technician?”
• Get a phone call out of the blue with an interview offer. Well, I sure wasn’t gonna get the job, but they offered to fly me in for the interview in The Big City, and I had some friends there that I hadn’t met in years
• Immovable event shows up, and I was looking forward to attending that.
• Fired off an email to the company asking if it was possible to reschedule. I wasn’t gonna get the job anyway, so I didn’t feel like I had much to lose.
• To my surprise they rescheduled. Updated flight details arrived shortly after.
• Eventually flew down, went through with the interview. Didn’t perform particularly well or poorly. Nothing noteworthy, really.
• Before leaving I asked what their estimate was for reaching a conclusion.
• Had a beer with the friends down there for the first time in a year
• Flew home. Waited.
• Conclusion date arrived. Clock passed 16:00, when most businesses closed.
• “Meh, fuckit. Can’t say I’m surprised”
• 21:30 or so I received an e-mail from the company with a job offer, already signed. Monthly pay far above what I imagined I’d ever be able to pull.
• Remember those hobbies? Yeah, turned out that they liked my linux and electronics hobbies, combined with me already being used to heavy machinery due to growing up on a farm.
• Kicked in the door to my flatmate. “I need you to lend me 100$” (equivalent in my currency)
• “Why?”
• "We’re going out to celebrate that I won’t have to borrow money from you anymore.

I left the industry in 2012 to get a “normal” job, but came back in 2019 after realizing that I hated normal jobs, and that normal jobs are for normal people. After a few promotions and being poached by a competitor I am no longer offshore, but I support the operation from wherever I am. There’s still some travel to the far corners of the world for mobilizing for a new survey and that sort of stuff, but I’m mostly in my home office these days. Pays quite handsomely, though.

As for recommendations, I’ve been extremely lucky. Most of my coworkers have a masters degree, either in something technical or in geophysics. I guess one of those is a better choice.

But after having taken part in some of the interviews, I’ve learned that there aren’t really that many hard requirements when it comes to skills or diplomas. It’s better to find the right kind of personality who knows something useful. The rest can be taught.