What would be a good career to change to from programming?

Question

I have 1 year of experience developing machine automachine software in Visual Basic 6.0 and 2.5 years of experience developing process automation and data acquisition software in LabVIEW 7.11+. I am having a very hard time finding employment as a programmer in my area and need to consider changing my career.

What careers will be easiest to transition to without any additional education?

Answer 1

It seems as though I am always seeing positions open for "Business Analysts", or "Project Managers." Although you may not have enough experience for the PM thing, if you have a college degree, chances are you are more than qualified to be a business analyst. Sometimes these positions are named different variations, like "systems analyst." Basically, you help mediate the communication between the business people and the technical people. The only thing to be careful of is that as the analyst, you are not usually allowed to do any of the actual coding, so it can be a little frustrating. The pay is usually good though. Good luck.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what a good field would be going away from programming. Still, if you find programming interesting you should learn a different language. Labview is a niche product and VB is not considered useful for moderate and large scale software. C#, Java or C++ would be a better choice.

Answer 3

IT educator? Vocational Institute lecturer?