Thanks for the replies.

Limeslice - thanks for your experience - I will try to analyse what else I enjoy and take it from there.

Sushee - I agree although I have some PM experience it isn't a job that I have a particular affinity for and definitely doesn't really fit in with work life balance in my experience.

Marydean - The government jobs all seem to be in Canberra - and DH has at last got a job he loves in an area he wants after years of his career being on the back burner as he followed me round the world - so although in long term we are not averse to trying life somewhere else in Aus we are here till 2016 at the earliest.

I am looking quite widely - I definitely have plenty of transferable skills and started life as a BA but there are very few part-time roles advertised and as majority of IT jobs seem to go through agencies they are not prepared to market you as a part-time proposition to a full-time opportunity. That is if you can convince them you have the experience in the first place - my experience with recruitment agencies has not been positive on the whole - unless you have a job title that matches exactly what they want they rule you out, and have no real grasp of the job in the first place. For example my whole SAP career I have been involved in testing, writing test plans and test cases, executing them, recording defects, incidents etc - but I have never had a role title of 'Tester' - so they say "so you weren't really a tester - we want 5 years of solid testing experience". Even within the SAP world they seem to think if you have worked with version 4.6 instead of 4.7 then that is no good - that is like saying someone who has used Word 95 can't use Word 2000 - the concept of transferable skills seems to pass them by completely. I know if you can get to the employer then often they actually have a much better idea around this but how do you cut out the recruitment agent? ( I do tailor resume for particular roles e.g. highlighting testing skills in ones for testing jobs but I am not up to bending the truth completely and changing job titles).

I am pretty confident in my resume - when I was made redundant in 2010 - went on a course and had personal support in structuring them and lots of advice and checking of them - and have had only 10 months of work to add into them since then.

I also have plenty of experience in Training SAP but have never been a Trainer - but most of those jobs do tend to involve travel.

If I go for full-time jobs then alot of the BA or BSA roles they want you to have already got experience in whatever area (banking for example) - or the more junior ones they then say am too experienced and don't believe I would stick around.

This is what I am doing currently and can continue to do till end of Feb (kids in daycare 3 days a week - I can't keep them in there that many days without working but once I give up days unlikely to get back)

- Checking out all the adverts both on the big names Seek etc, plus Ethical, InfoExchange, Government
- Where jobs are through recruiters - trying to identify the company - often they will tell me if I phone up (if I don't mention part-time and unwillingness to travel I get plenty of interest) - then trying to see if I know anyone through LinkedIn etc at that company so I can try, now I know they are looking, sell myself part-time to them.
- Emailing/meeting old colleagues trying to find any openings

I have been looking since October, on average a job takes 3 months to find apparently so till end of Feb I have given myself 5 - but there is only so long I can go on looking - hence the thoughts of change of career.

Part of the problem is that my experience is in SAP, and SAP is in the main contract roles with very high pay rates (unfortunately I personally have always been a permanent employee apart from my last role which wasn't through an agency so didn't have the SAP premium - I should have been a contractor before having a family and made the money then) - they have come down a bit over the past few years but are still high (people hear you are in SAP and think you must be rolling in it) and probably with just cause employers as are paying so much want blood (e.g. travel, long hours etc) - you don't always need this and in my mind they could save money by thinking outside the box and employing a cheaper alternative e.g. me - but recruitment agents will not put you forward for lower rates because they don't want to undercut their own market. So the market is polarized into $600 - $800 a day contractors and at the other end is all outsourced to India - with nothing in the middle. People can't then understand why you want to move outside SAP as they see it as so lucrative - so are suspicious that you won't hang around. The idea that someone might want a job that fits with their life more than money seems to be incomprehensible to some people.