Where to take my career?

[mwooldri]

It's been 3 weeks since I separated from my employer; I took their severance package. I was working as an Assistant Manager in a 60 person contact center for a direct sales organization. I was there for 3 years. A lot of the role was how a typical contact center supervisor would work, but because it wasn't a big contact center I found myself doing all kinds of different roles - quality analysis, workforce management, recruitment and hiring, voice of the customer (surveys) etc. The past year I had my team removed from me and my focus was on these other things. Why this happened was that I had learned a bit of PHP and managed to automate a lot of processes that were previously done manually (the contact center was definitely technologically challenged).

The separation was forced on me; I had ran out of sick time and no FMLA available as I had exhausted it the previous year when I had a depressive episode relapse.

I had previously worked for American Express for 15 years, most as a 2nd level rep (to the public we were supervisors but we had no staff report to us).

In between American Express and my previous job I got my health/life insurance licence and got recruited by an insurance company but the role started off cold-calling a list of people turning 65 (Medicare supplement insurance sales). Hated it. Quit. Decided prospecting isn't good for me.

So my severance is going to run out. I cannot get unemployment insurance. What should I do?

There's enough contact center rep jobs out there but they pay $10-13/hour. Should I try to undersell myself? (Easy to do except for my last role). Hope for promotion from within even though I can do the phone rep job role in my sleep?

Not many customer service supervisor roles out there... but should I aim higher? I could do my last boss's job, so go for the customer service manager role?

Should I try again at insurance sales and hope I get a company that's light on prospecting?

Since all I have is a bunch of college credits (2 years in Scotland, bunch in NC) and I have no idea how UK A-levels translate to in the US system...

I also spent a fair bit of time learning PHP ... should I consider coding boot camp and try to get work coding?

Moving/relocation isn't an option. Raleigh/Durham NC is just about commutable from Greensboro NC and there's more tech firms there.

Any ideas on where I can put my career?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.