I have some experience with this. And I struggle with what to do someday.
When I lived in Canada, I took a certification for bike mechanics through Winterbourne Bike Institute. It was awesome. As an engineer, I always wrenched on my own bikes and helped with friend’s small mech issues. The program I took just helped me fine tune and learn some structure to an existing interest and passion. I learned all the annoying nuances of cheap bikes, how to build wheels, and everything in between. It also was super fun to take the program when I had lost my job and had a year of severance to explore things that I enjoyed.
I explored options of working in a shop, or starting my own, but more than anything I could switch my career so dramatically, cutting my financial earnings in half or more. I couldn’t, nor could my wife, commit to this despite the passion. Fast forward a bit and we moved to Germany for my wife’s work, putting me in an opportunity to be Chief Transition Officer for a couple of years. After a year, I started getting antsy to work again (I know), I decided to work part-time and was pretty limited in my options as an expat spouse. The certificate from the program I had previously taken years before proved far more effective than my actual resume. I approached a local bike shop and took a part-time job as a mechanic. For one year I built more Specialized Levos than one can imagine and worked on countless MTBs (despite being the shop’s only “roadie”), practiced my German, learned way more than I imagined, and made some great friends. But it wasn’t a career. I was playing mechanic and my career was calling and I couldn’t commit, yet again.
I’m still in Germany and took on a “real job” at the very end of 2019. It’s great to earn real money again, but I constantly think of how I could do this mechanic thing some day. It’s definitely a tough gig making a career out of it. Maybe one day I’ll figure that out.
In the meantime, the experience and skills are not taken for granted. I have some good tools and still the same passion that lets me do things like buy vintage frames on eBay and transform them into awesomeness (See my singlespeed that I’m super proud of), or pick up some killer hubs and completely re-lace a set of rims to upgrade a set of wheels, or take calls from friends back home and help them fix a bike over WhatsApp, or provide advice on new bike shopping with other expats and local friends…I don’t regret it one bit and it’s by FAR the most interesting thing that I’m proud to have on my resume.