Hanging up wings-advice needed.

I find the springboard options are very hard to understand and anything that seemdled remotely good for me ended up being 150 kms away.

While you figure what direction you want to go you can help yourself quite easily get IT literate enough to get you foot in the door. As you have said Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are the core products you would need in most workplaces. Google and YouTube would be your friend here and there is a wealth of free knowledge out there to get you up to speed. ECDL is very useful but last I checked its getting a little dated in content.

Start building your CV in Word and make 4 or 5 versions that target different types of role that you may apply for. Use google to ask how to do various layouts or formatting and spend hours making it stand out. Also use Word to make a sales elevator pitch about you in a brochure format and also write a white pager in how to build a CV

Use excel to plan your finances, its great practice to setup formula’s. Then use excel to plan your training, next holiday, Christmas presents list etc. Its a powerful tool that can be used for much more than boring spreadsheets.

Use PowerPoint to make a presentation about you and all the qualities that sell yourself to employer. Spent a lot of time to make it professional and use google and YouTube for tips to make it really amazing using the right animation and design. Then create your own PowerPoint template that is uniquely your own.

Start using Outlook to plan your day and sending emails, in office based roles your diary runs your life to a point and its handy for a few other areas like to do lists.

Don’t forget Microsoft teams is the new cool product to collaborating with colleagues. Teams is the full Microsoft suite wrapped in a cloud and web based or download on your PC. Its used for video conferences, voice calls, sharing documents and so much more.

Start playing around with your computer.

Mess around with Word, Excel.

Just try things, google things.

One of the key aspects of "being good with computers" is googling things, trying them, and not being afraid that you'll "break your computer".

I've been in IT for over 25 years and there's loads of things I don't know. So when I'm using some new software I just try to figure it out and google it when I am stuck.

Don't be afraid of breaking your computer, you really have to make an effort to do that.

Already mentioned by another poster but wanted to second https://www.ecollege.ie

Courses are free at the moment and there are all the relevant Microsoft suite courses there. I have used it before for a more in-depth course and found it very easy to use. It could be good to have something to do and give yourself some routine as losing a job can leave us feeling a little lost and listless. Doing something like that might give you a bit of time to figure out if you do want to go down the route of further education. It's not always feasible for people to spend 2 - 4 years in academia in order to up-skill but you might find yourself drawn to a certain area and want to pursue it.

You are already identifying areas you need to improve on and that's great, but remember to focus on your strengths too, hone in on what areas of work you might be suited to. You can set up alerts for keywords on job websites. From your post you have a decent standard of typing and grammar so don't be too hard on yourself. Many jobs will offer training once you start too. Best of luck OP, not an easy time for you.

RedXIV wrote: »

A Business Analyst with those skills is worth their weight in gold. A common scenario in big IT companies is a bunch of engineers who aren't great at communication and a linchpin in the middle who can get people to talk, and only needs the most basic of IT knowledge.

+1 to this, when I took on my first 3rd line engineering team my first hire using a technical headcount to fill it was a customer service orientated person from a department store to do that function. Roll on 10 years she is now a director of user experience in a global Bank.

Now we use official roles like Program/project co-ordinators for internal facing positions and of course Business analyst. Getting engineering teams organised is like herding cats so not dissimilar to cabin crew:). Customer oriented roles that are gaining momentum and worth looking into would be titles like Customer Success, user experience (UX), customer advocacy etc

Hi OP, sorry to hear about your situation, and having been there myself 10 years ago, I know how it feels.

When looking at where to go next there are three options - stay in the same industry, move to a similar role in another industry, out a complete career change. I presume you'll be looking at the latter two so you'll need to be thinking about what skills you have and transferrable skills. Off the top of my head, if be thinking sales and health and safety are at least two. As I'm not in the industry, of course I don't know them all but it's worth investing some time thinking about it.

Once you've identified your transferrable skills, you may need to take some courses to bolster your skills relative to the industry you are interested in. An operative knowledge of Microsoft office is essential for most roles these days, but if you can post on boards, these skills should be no bother to you too learn. They're are lots of YouTube courses on office for free online - an hour every evening for two weeks will give you the knowledge required for 90% of jobs - and speed with office comes with practice.

If you are looking at a new direction, you'll probably need your redundancy to fund this. Going back to college could seem daunting but don't let that put you off. There's loads of info here in other threads where people have done this before. I would say that do consider what graduate salaries are for the given degree you are choosing if you do go this way as for many industries they wouldn't compare favourably with a cabin crew salary of 25 years standing.

Best of luck