Midlife crisis led to unemployment with no prospects - seeking guidance

Career Advice
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I have around 15 years of experience in large consulting firms and a Big4, mostly in helping firms undergo Digital Transformation and legacy modernisation work such as Cloud adoption.

My role has always been to help identify and formalise the strategic direction organisations need to take. I have been involved in work such as the IT lead for carve-outs in M&A (scoping and managing the team that performed all the cutover implementation activities), mapping out current and target state environments, helping pull together an enterprise and technical architecture, agree solutions with stakeholders all the way upto CEO level for firms like Deutsche Bank, UBS etc.

I am also proficient in business (British Computing Society - Chartered IT Professional, MBA etc.) and technically skilled with certifications (not valid) such as Microsoft Azure Certified Architect, AWS Professional, CCNA, ITILv3 and some others like Agile Scrum Master.
I can hold highly technical conversations with project teams including things such as (to give examples) Dynamic NAT configuration requirements for firewalls, configuration settings for VMs to match resilience and performance needs, AD server configuration, IDAM and SSO authentication approaches etc.

With regards to Cybersecurity experience, among several other projects I was the domain lead for a global firm to help them uplift their Cybersecurity capabilities for their Cloud platforms and led a few engagements in that space. This included agreeing the architectural direction and agreeing capability uplift projects for things like: the right level of monitoring in the Cloud, a capability to encrypt workloads in Azure, CASB product selection criteria and a pattern to segregate workloads in the Cloud based on their criticality.

During covid-19, I became a victim to domestic abuse and got torn apart from my child which let to a fundamental breakdown in my life. While I did not have a major gap in my employment it caused me to rapidly switch jobs and take up several jobs.

Recently over the past few months my job got outsourced outside the UK and I have since then been unable to find a single job, no matter how senior or junior it is. I am trying my best to tailor my CV, highlight relevant skills etc. to the role description but this is not yielding any success.

I am currently keeping myself busy by working on my product plan that has been approved by Microsoft for Stratups; this has required me to brush up Python and use Azure OpenAI tech. stack.

To be honest, I am not sure what to do anymore. From earning over ÂŁ100k a year I am now down to claiming benefits in UK and relying on family member handouts to afford rent.

I am almost out of options and I am not so sure what to do anymore.

Does anyone have any career advice or options for me?

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I wanted to let this post sit a day and give it some thought. I am sorry that you were hurt. Life is hard enough without having to deal with trauma. I would suggest that your job hopping was perhaps an attempt to wipe the slate clean and avoid dealing with the fallout of the abuse. Sadly, we can’t escape ourselves no matter how hard we try. So my first piece of advice is to take advantage of whatever services your country offers and work through the hurt so that it is not a constant stumbling block going forward. You need to regain your confidence because you have an impressive set of skills. You are in many ways the “after” picture as you have held the kind of roles many here only dream of. You need to value yourself again. This will allow others to see you and value you as well.

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@JosephWhite thank you for your reply. Part of recovery is also to keep myself productive and get back into active employment.

Do you have any thoughts on revenue making options, that I could consider no matter how less income it yields?
Would getting some entry level certifications help me get roles such as a GRC/SOC analyst, pen tester etc. (depending on what path I take) ?

I am working on using my knowledge of machine learning to now build some illustrative projects that demonstrate how AI regulatory compliance can be achieve (just some points of view and code repositories that I will make public). The hope is that it will help showcase some technical proficiency and open me up to some junior roles (I say junior because all my knowledge is theorotical and I have never done a programming/scripting role professionally).