[djmcmath]

Maybe it's a little late to be asking, I'm 30, but I thought I'd throw this out to the Pelican Brain-Trust in hopes of some inspiration. The fact that the Pelican demographic is largely guys who are successful because of their work ethic and smarts is a huge factor here.

Here's the situation: I love my job (defense contracting, building a submarine simulator for the US Navy -- IT project management and tech work with a healthy dose of travel), and I absolutely excel at it, but the pay is only mediocre. While I don't have actual numbers from my co-workers, the impression I get is that there's relatively little upward motion in salary here. So my first-year salary may only barely edge out inflation for the duration of my time at this company.

Now don't get me wrong, here -- I don't have any need to be filthy rich, but it seems like "day laborers" in the DC Metro area are making just shy of 6 figures. We're not paupers, but it would be nice if we weren't quite so close to the bottom end of the middle class.

So I'm looking ahead at what I should be preparing to do -- I ended up in this job fresh out of 9 years as a Submarine Officer, and it seemed like a natural choice for someone with a CS degree and my particular experience. Now that I'm here, however, I'm wondering if this is the right place for me long-term. I've only been here for 6 months, so I can't realistically just leave for at least another year or 18 months, so I have time to figure something out.

So the extreme options include going back to school for a second master's, or even a completely different degree. Econ seems interesting to me. MBA's always seem to make more money than I do, if the program is any good. I have no problems with the stress of a line of work like medicine, except that I could never do surgery. I think that Law is fascinating, but my wife says I'd have a real hard time selling myself to the Jury. Less dramatic moves would include getting my PMP and moving into some other PM field (non-IT), or getting my CCNE and getting more involved in the network engineering side of the house. I'm 100% confident that if something is interesting to me, I will have no difficulty learning it.

I guess what I'm wondering is: what is the next big growth industry that I could be a part of, or what consistently wealthy industry is something that would interest me? I'm looking for brainstorm ideas here -- just start throwing stuff out. What do you do, and why do you enjoy it? How hard would it be for a guy with a lot of technical background to transition to that field?


It's pretty broad, but I'm looking forward to hearing anyone's thoughts.


Thanks,
Dan