and third (selling heirloom tomato plants; consulting/business change mgt/proj mgt/Lean sigma/myers briggs)

And I did study and prepare for it, as an adult.

But I didn't have the nipples for it.

Wanted to be an PR/Comm pro in the NPO sector, ended up working in retail sales, banking and as a screenwriter.

Still want to be in PR/Comm in NPO sector. Still don't enjoy writing anything longer than 2 pages. Banking and sales: it's interesting...you can not enjoy it and even be terrible at it (I'm not, I just have no passion for it.) but once you're in it and it's on the resume, it's the only thing anybody else ever wants to hire you to do.

Write a very good cover letter about why you'd be right for the position.

Use your experience in the banking sector as a strength in understanding the financial side of running a business.

NPO's need SALES people - to "Sell" them to the donors they have, to "sell" their services (not talking $) to the public.

NPO's need people with good writing skills.

And you need to USE those writing skills to convince them of your passion and desire to leave "banking/sales" and enter the NPO sector (and why).

The important thing to convince them of is "why should they hire YOU". What can you bring to the table. What can you do for them.

The other thing I'd suggest is - if you haven't already - start doing volunteer work with various non-profits. Pick the field of your choice, or spread it around. Maybe do several. Get the time and exposure in. Make friends with those who run the place. Maybe something would open up there, or at the very least, you can let them help you network and use them as a reference.

If that's what you want to do, then I say go for it! Are you willing to relocate? Pay your own relocation expenses? Take a pay cut? You'll probably have to work longer hours for less money - but I assume you know that and don't care.

It's kind of what I wanted to do; kind of the field.

I started out as a typesetter. and then there was an opening in my company for a copy editor, and I was hired.

Both jobs are fluid and evolving and ther's always more to learn. But I also haz mad skills.

I grew up in a medical family. My father was an RN and a surgical technician. His mother was an LPN. I didn't want to go into medicine just because they did. I spent years in unfulfilling retail & banking jobs, not really knowing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Then my wife, who was similarly unfulfilled by her labor in the retail & sales gulags, decided to go back to school to be a dental hygienist; a job that pays well, but she could leave at the office at the end of the day. I worked a job I hated for four years to put her through school. And when she graduated, went to work, and started making good money, she told me: "Okay, now go and do what you want to do".

I researched the possibilities in a career like hers as a mid-level medical provider, and decided to become a Physician Assistant. One of the requirements for admission to P.A. school was a minimum of 4,000 hours of hands-on clinical work. So I had to go to school to learn to be a Medical Assistant in order to qualify for P.A. training. I worked for 5 years as an MA, then applied for P.A. school, getting accepted on my second try.

It took eight years from the time I made the decision to become a medical provider, until I actually became one. That's the longest, and most intensely I've ever been focussed on achieving a specific goal.

The head of our Criminal Justice/Poly Sci dept used to work for ••••••, and sent me to interview with a •••••• and trainer. They put me on a "career track" within a few months. After a few years traveling and working, I was able to finish my degree. After leaving the G, I went to work in the private sector and eventually opened my own PI biz. I quit that biz a few years ago to work with endangered species. I recently was forced into retirement.

So, long story.... Just call me the Human Bouncy Ball.

Funny ... While doing research this morning I turned to a college textbook published in the 1970s.

When I was in 9th grade, my career report was on law -- I wanted to be a lawyer. I never did make that, but when an opportunity came up to work in a law firm, I jumped at it. I was a good secretary and when the paralegal field opened up, I was promoted and specialized in corporate/business law. I took a few paralegal courses at the local community college and seminars whenever available. I even taught the paralegal studies program at the local university for a number of years before they closed the corporate side of the program. The last 13 years of my career, I worked in the legal department of an engineering company. If it hadn't been for that friend of my mother's who needed to take 3 months off for health reasons, who recommended me as a temp to her boss, I'm not sure I would have ever had the opportunity to get into the legal field. Yup, I fell into it.

into the field you wanted to be in.

My nephew, his girlfriend and I were smokin' and drinkin' one night. He dared me to last six weeks working in a nursing home. The prize was a case of Colt 45 Talls. Weakest stomach in recorded history, if someone fell and bled, that was me off somewhere puking.

Fell in love with the work. It became my mistress, challenged me; rewarded me; forced me to never quit learning, and seldom was there a lack of work. The beer was good, but the impact of the dare was so much better.

No idea what I'd do, tho Dad wanted me to attend law school, apartment with a friend + her friend worked at U. Chicago law school, introduced me to 2 attorneys starting Civil Legal Aid Service at Cook County Jail. They needed a secretary, I had a portable typewriter (gift from folks after high school graduation) and was willing to schlep it to jail every day. After a few years, moved into town with boss at other legal services programs, decided 'I can do what they're doing,' and the rest is history!

My problem is that I want to do everything, but I only get one life.

I trained for my career, but I'm engaged in a part of it that I would have never anticipated, the business side of it.

I'm decidedly ambivalent about that.

When I was in high school, there were few options for girls--- nurse, teacher, secretary, or marriage. I went to college with other intentions, but ended up in education. I'm still teaching, many years later.

I "fell into" college teaching while I was in college.

to become one, requiring some schooling, which didn't take long. I had already worked in litigation as a secretary while going to college, so knew something about it already.

Turns out I had a knack for it, and have been more or less happy with it, and it paid me well for years. I just transferred to a less stressful, fewer hours job.....still as a litigation paralegal. But so that I can have more normal hours and a life outside of work.

It's been interesting for me. I've liked it. But I had planned on becoming an English teacher since my teens, which I abandoned to become a litigation paralegal.

I studied in Drafting Technology (and later in Graphic Arts.)

While I did have a class in Cartography, it was probably twenty years between studying it and beginning to get mapping positions handed to me from minor mapping experience previously. All of that was on-the-job training and experience. Still, I do need to take at least one course in AutoCAD Civil 3D to improve what I know about it now.

Living the dream I got what I wanted: Good, bad and the indifferent.

I am glad though that I followed the path I wanted to since I was about 12, and didn't take my father's advice to get an MBA and become a desk jockey. To that end, I'm the relative black sheep of his offspring for having a blue collar job, though I'm doing better overall than my siblings through all the economic downturn.

The only reason I even went directly to college after high school instead of taking a year off was that it was 1970, I was very draftable, and the Vietnam conflict was in full swing. I had met "some people" during my college years, and got recruited right after. It seems that people who speak Spanish, Russian, Swedish, French and German were deemed to be of use in some quarters. My mom told me I could "play at this James Bond stuff" for a few years, but then I should look for a serious job, go to business school or something.

But I knew then that a desk job would kill me. So now I just turned 60, have been station chief for Europe for my outfit for years, am married to the beautiful German woman I met at age 22, still travel like a maniac, and have so far avoided having to go to business school and look for a serious job.

So far, so good.

pediatric hospice nurse when the home health agency I worked for went out of business.
My job is pretty much my life. I don't have too much of a personal life and my work
makes me feel that I have a purpose. Kinda the philosophy of "those who can't do
teach".

But in fairness, the work I have done for more than the past decade did not exist when I left graduate school.

New things are invented - someone has to support them.

Working my way up through the ranks. Lucky break being hired and trained in a "related position". Another lucky break getting hired by a company that knew me (and whose boss had just broken up with MY boss so he wanted to give her a shot by hiring me . . . if you know what I mean.)

Then OJT - no one to train me - I just had to figure it out! I did take a class at that time, plus lots of seminars.

Another stroke of luck when after 15 years of being a stay at home mom, looking for a job for 4 years, I was hired by a startup because they needed someone who could do "a little bit of everything" as I would BE the "office". Since that was me - well, I got the chance. And I was flexible. And I started working 45-50 hours a week. And in a very short time our Consultant pool had grown so much I had to start hiring assistants and the boss started having to hire more management types.

Now we have 13 - soon to be 18 people working in the office (more projected in the not too distant future), and closing in on 150 people total employed. (We'll pass that quickly, though, well before the end of the year.)

Some of my old "assistants" have peeled off to their own departments (specialties) and have their own assistants.

I'm the Director of my own department with one assistant, probably soon to be two.

I've just recently become professionally certified in my field.

(And I was a music major! lol)

I studied for one thing and did secondary studies in a lesser paying but some what parallel field. While going to school I found a part time position in the secondary field.

I graduated with a dual degree in 1982 and thanks to Reagan, the bottom had dropped out of my areas of study. Dual degree and unable to find anything. The part time position even disappeared for two years.

I spent two years scraping by on any day work I could get until the place I had worked part time called and had a permanent position for me. They liked my work and were glad I was available. That was not what I had originally wanted but it evidently was the right place for me, after 28+ years I have moved to the global technology center and have global accountability for the group I started the company with. The perk is international travel to some exciting locations.

I guess it found me.

I trained to become a college professor teaching Japanese, and I even did that for eleven years. I had always been attracted to the idea of translation, but I didn't know how to get into it. Still, teaching provided a steady paycheck and benefits, interesting colleagues, and some great travel perks.

However, my job ended and the fad for studying Japanese was diminishing, so when I looked for a new job, I found only one-year and two-year jobs in parts of the country where I didn't want to live.

As I was in my last year of teaching, pondering my fate, a phone call from an old classmate got me into textbook editing. It was a contract job that was supposed to last a year, but because the author was not very good at meeting deadlines., it lasted three years. During that time, I gradually transitioned into translation, first by finding a translators' mailing list on the Internet and then by accepting low-paying, boring jobs.

By the time the textbook job wound up, I was earning enough money from translation to live on. The U.S. does not have a national system of certifying translators, and although there are universities that offer degrees in translation, most practicing translators do not have one. It's more like the performing arts than anything else: You start out small and get better jobs by proving your ability. Most of the translators I know started out by doing something else.