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Chloe Phillips

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Unpopular opinion. I left process engineering and barely looked back

I spent eleven years in process work, mostly in pharma plants across Ireland and the UK. Long shifts, endless documentation, and the sort of mental fatigue that follows you home and sits at the dinner table with you. The money was decent, better than a lot of hands-on trades I knew growing up, but it was never really about the pay for me. At least not after the first few years. What got me was the sameness. The same GMP audits, the same batch records, the same deviation investigations looping back on themselves. I used to tell myself it was stable, that stability was the trade off for never really being challenged. That held for a while. Then it didn't. The hardest part wasn't the resume or retraining. It was sitting with the doubt and doing it anyway. I was terrified when I left. I had no plan, no safety net. But that uncertainty forced me to finally figure out what I actually wanted, which was a job where I got to help other people figure that out too. So here I am, mentoring mid-career changers, and honestly the transition has been the most meaningful work I've done. Do not get me wrong, process engineering is a solid field. If you want structure and a clear ladder, it delivers. Some of my old colleagues are still there and genuinely happy. But it asks for a kind of patience with routine that I lost somewhere around year eight. People romanticise leaving their old career like it's this clean break. It wasn't clean. It was messy and anxious and I second guessed everything for months. But that's where the real shift happens, in the mess.