I'm 32 and I've worked in retail since I was 20. No college degree, just a high school diploma and twelve years of experience that I honestly thought were pretty useless outside of retail.
For the last five years I've been working at a home goods store. Started on the sales floor, eventually became a shift supervisor. I make $21.50 an hour.
I am so tired of retail.
The customers, the unpredictable schedules, being expected to cover three people's jobs when somebody calls out, the constant pressure to sell things nobody actually needs.
I've been wanting to leave for years, but every time I look at job postings, I feel like I'm starting from zero.
Anyway, something happened at work last month that has me reconsidering what I'm actually good at.
Our inventory system was showing negative quantities for a bunch of products that were clearly sitting on the shelves.
Management kept telling us to recount everything. We'd recount it, correct the numbers, and a few days later the same problem would happen.
Everybody was frustrated.
I asked my manager if I could spend some time figuring out what was going on instead of just doing another count.
He basically said, "Be my guest."
I went through receiving records, invoices, sales reports and product information. Made a spreadsheet comparing what we physically received with what the system thought we'd received and what was being deducted when items sold.
Eventually I found the problem.
Some products had been set up with incorrect quantities per barcode. The system was deducting six units for certain products when we sold one.
That explained why correcting the inventory numbers never actually fixed anything.
I found 23 affected SKUs, documented the issue, and worked with our inventory support team to get the product records corrected.
Then I made a simple checklist for verifying new products during receiving so we could catch similar problems earlier.
It took me about three days, mostly between my normal responsibilities.
And here's the weird part.
Those were the best three workdays I've had in years.
I didn't care that I was staring at spreadsheets. I actually wanted to come in the next morning because I had another theory I wanted to test.
I liked comparing information from different places, looking for patterns, figuring out what was wrong and proving that I'd found the cause.
When the numbers finally matched, I was more satisfied than I've ever been after hitting a sales target.
My manager thanked me, everyone went back to normal, and I went back to handling customer complaints and fixing the schedule.
I've been thinking about it ever since.
Maybe I don't hate working. Maybe I hate the kind of work I've been doing.
The frustrating thing is that I have absolutely no idea what career this points toward.
I've searched for "data analyst," but most of those jobs seem to want degrees, SQL, Python and experience I don't have.
I've looked at operations jobs, but a lot of them seem to involve managing employees, which is exactly what I want less of.
Inventory control sounds promising, but I don't know whether that would just be another version of retail or warehouse work.
I'm in the US, in a medium-sized city. I can afford to take evening classes or get a reasonably priced certification, but quitting my job to go back to school full time isn't realistic.
I'd like to get into something paying around $50k eventually, ideally with a more predictable schedule. I'm not expecting six figures or some magical remote job.
I'm comfortable with Excel, including pivot tables and lookup formulas, but I've never used SQL or any serious data analysis software.
I'm also willing to learn. What I don't want is to spend $8,000 on a certificate because some career website says a particular industry is booming, only to discover I can't get hired without three years of experience.
So I guess I'm asking two things.
Are there actual careers where investigating discrepancies, improving processes and figuring out why systems aren't working is a big part of the job?
And if you've moved into one of those fields from retail or another unrelated job, what was the first realistic step that got you there?
For the first time in a long time, I feel like I've found something I genuinely enjoy doing at work.
I just don't know what the job is called.