u/angelwormwood

I am in the UK and appreciate that most here are in the US and jobs don’t always translate, I’ve never seen an environmental technician job posted here for instance but that’s a common recommended entry level job on here. Regardless, I would appreciate any insight or advice from those working in anything environmental.

I’m studying an engineering degree currently, I was originally studying environmental science but paid conservation and restoration jobs are so rarely posted and so hyper competitive, and they’re always low paid and fixed contracts so in the interest of establishing financial stability and having more career options I switched to engineering. Luckily I am interested in engineering as well, although the maths is more difficult to wrap my head around.

Job wise I would still like to be as field based as possible, I already have a full time job where I sit on a computer all day and it’s miserable, I hate it. I would love to be outside most of the time, summer excluded I cannot stand warm weather, and I want to be active and not sitting for hours at a time. So I’m just wondering if anyone here has any suggestions for me to look into that might meet these preferences. So far I’m thinking of focusing on renewable energy engineering, I’d love to work off shore on wind turbines for instance.

I’m 28 and had a very turbulent education originally due to being in foster care. I had no qualifications and then went back to school when I was 25 to do an access course, my original plan was to just improve my education and go and study languages, but then I fell into voluntary conservation work and wanted to try to move into any kind of role in the environmental sector.

Because my access course was in humanities I had no STEM experience so I’ve been studying with the OU for 2 years, studying environmental science to start and then I’m switching to environmental engineering in October.

The dream would still be field based conservation work but that’s hard to get into and barely ever paid, so I’m looking to go into anything relating to renewable energies or nuclear, or water treatment and waste management.

I’ve not had any luck applying for degree apprenticeships as I still don’t have a qualification, and my full time job is as a disability employment advisor so I only have soft skills. I’m wondering at this point whether it might be a better option for me to apply for low level apprenticeships instead that would be a little bit more relevant to my long term goals. It would be difficult financially but I can’t stress enough how much I hate my current job, I would do anything to leave it tbh.

I’m studying for career purposes but like maybe many of you I don’t work in the field I’m studying for.

I’m on Q65 BEng but was working as a librarian until a couple years ago, part of the reason I chose the OU was because I liked my job and didn’t want to quit it with no guarantee of whether uni would work for me. That and when I did my access course I was planning to study languages and then do a library science masters but ended up scrapping that plan as I didn’t want to work in a library anymore, so I didn’t have any relevant qualifications for engineering.

Then I left that job and now work in the civil service in a job I don’t like very much but I’m using that as motivation to study hard and be a professional engineer.