What was the career change you regretted, and how many months in did you know

Paid a lot for a bootcamp and the actual mistake was thinking the certificate was the product. What got me hired was three months of unglamorous volunteer reporting work for a local charity, which gave me real messy data and a reference who could speak about my work. The course was a syllabus I could have followed for the price of a couple of books.

Left teaching for a support engineering job. The first honest sign was about month five, when I realised I had swapped a job with hard days and clear meaning for a job with easy days and none. I stayed three years, the money was better by a reasonable margin, and I still describe it as the right decision made for the wrong reasons. If your current role is bad because of your manager rather than the work, a change of field will not touch that.

Signal one: you cannot name a single person doing the new job who you have spoken to for an hour. Signal two: the appeal is what you are leaving, not what you are going to. Fix both before you resign.

My regret was not the field, it was the sequencing. I quit first, then studied, and burned seven of my nine months of savings before the first interview because I badly underestimated how long hiring takes when you have no relevant title yet. The people I know who switched smoothly did the first eight months of it at 6am while still employed, and only left once they had something adjacent on the CV. Being unemployed makes you take the first offer, and the first offer is usually the worst one.

Careful with the regret stories in threads like this, including mine, because you are hearing from whoever feels strongly this week. I moved from finance to analytics and month four was awful, month eight was fine, year two was clearly better than the alternative. If I had posted at month four you would be reading a warning. Give yourself a fixed review date twelve months out and refuse to evaluate it before then.