Katherine's Story

If I had a pound for every time someone said to me “I always wanted to be a vet, you’re so lucky!”, I would be wealthy now! I know I was lucky, it was a fulfilling and interesting job and I loved it, so why did I change?

Because life changes. Even the most apparently interesting job can become routine and dull and I found that the only way I could move to more interesting work within my profession was to relocate, possibly even to another country. I didn’t want to do that, I have a young family and like where I live. Also the night duty and long hours were getting to me and interfering with how I wanted to live.

I had long had a passionate interest in computers and especially the Internet, I could spend hours lost in figuring out how something was done or what I could make it do, I never seemed to have enough time to satisfy my curiosity. So when the opportunity arose to sell my veterinary practice, I took a deep breath, sold up and started to seriously look at the rapidly growing world of the Internet as a place where I could make a new career.

One big advantage in this new world of mine is that nobody looks at your qualifications – they look at what you can do. I just had to learn to ‘do’ very fast, and I did! Surprisingly there are common skills between my two careers – both are essentially involved in problem solving, in bringing the diverse things you know to bear on a particular and specific problem.

So now I work from a home office, largely dictate my own hours, work with people all over the globe and absolutely love what I do. I am learning something new every day, am never bored and truly my hobby is my work.

People reacted in some odd ways to the changes I made. Lots of people were encouraging, some were envious that I had managed to make such a leap but many others were less positive and berated me for ‘wasting’ my education and my experience. This is rot. No experience is ever wasted and I know that the change was right for me and for my family.

By the way I was 40 when I made this change – a veritable antiquity compared to many in my new field – so let nobody ever tell you it is too late to change!