It never hurts to keep a pulse on your marketing value tho. When was the last time you sent out your resume to see what you would be making anywhere else.

I’m new to office work scene so take this next bit anecdotally coming from someone who spent 10-15 years working as a machinist, chef and nurses aid, in that I lack the drive most have to be upset about the working from home shit. I’m a far more productive human outside of work with the structure and stability I get from having 9-5 hours 5 days a week work schedule. It’s something that’s always been apart of life and am too long sighted to let the 2 pamdemic years out of the 40-50 total years ill be working affect any decision regarding my means to make a living.

My approach to my career has always been influenced by what my uncle told me when i was in highschool. Which was, that even if my dream job was marine biology, after 30 years of feeding fish to dolphins I’ll get sick of it.

The paraphrased message of it was to make career decisions based off salary, compensation or job stability and not based off what makes me happy because a person’s happiness is more affected by not having the means to live a happy life outside of work because your career path decision resulted in you being without a job.

For you specifically my recommendation will assume you don’t work for pricks and would request with your application submission to have your interviewer not reach out to your current employer.

I would send out feelers to jobs you researched and classify as being “dream” jobs or enough improvements to you your current compensation for you to be interested. I would do this in 2 fashions. The first by sending resumes with your current qualifications and the second by maybe not sending resumes but definitely reaching out on jobs that would be available after you recieved the next tier of certification(s). Cross that with the cost, both on financial terms but also time spent terms (I’ve quantified this by apply my hourly wage as the hourly cost for time required for training. Not sire that is appropriate way of applying monetary value to free time spent), plus any additional but measurable costs or savings from things like commute for training or work from commute cost-savings.

If any jobs remain in the black means you will be better off making the change.

As for help making the decision to change, that’s all between you and your household dependants and filers. Only you know your own abilities to adapt to change, cope with stress, get along with new crowds. You also only know the other environmental variables affecting your decision like would you need to move residence, would there be a window of lost medical coverage (which would ve grouped in with the cost analysis if you needed to pay for your own medical switching jobs), but most importantly how much value you’re are putting into the things your missing out on. If you are missing out on hours spent gaming then maybe naaaa that shouldn’t be something to factor in. If your missing out on your dying mother/husband/child’s last days before the cancer kicks in then yeah that should play a factor in your decision.

Edit: To go a bit further, you don’t even have to go on any actual interviews. Just look to get accurate information about the job atmosphere and compensation. For me I was able to get that mostly thru the calls to set up an interview.

When I did go thru with seting up a couple interviews with the best options, there was no gripe from any of them when it came time to give them an answer to start the job and my response was always, “Thank you for the offer and time you gave me but my current employer has decided to match your competing offer to keep me on their team.” By taking this approach, you mitigate backlash from current employer finding out you are looking around, you gave potential employer prospects no reason to think you were only fishing for competitive offers or had no intent of taking the job but rather gave them proof the reasons they were going to hire you were justified that your employer’s ROI out weigh your employee compensation costs. Plus any company that would be bitter for potential employee candidates giving current employers opportunities to match their compensation offers is really looking to hire someone barely smart enough to do the job but dumb enough to not leave.

My experience using these recommendations are only been driven by requesting wages increases via presenting current employers with competing offers to match, not for improving my position/role thru training. So to add to the disclaimer in the body of this message, these recommendstions also assume you know your value to your employer and have been in good standing for several years in their eyes.