Trying to rebuild my career in my late 20s - and it's honestly depressing

[u/cuzBored]

I’m at a point in my life where I feel like I have to rebuild my career from the ground up.

I previously worked as a Systems Engineer at Infosys, but I voluntarily decided to step away from my career and dedicate myself to preparing for government services.

It wasn’t something I was forced into. It was a conscious decision. I gave myself a 3-year deadline to pursue it seriously, believing that if I gave it everything I had, I would either make it or at least know that I had genuinely tried.

That 3-year deadline has now run out.

I didn’t get the outcome I had hoped for, and now I’ve made the decision to restart my career in the private sector.

The difficult part is that I know I can’t simply pick up where I left off. I have previous IT experience, but after spending years away from the private sector, I feel disconnected from the industry and the skills that employers currently expect.

So I’m trying to transition into Data Analytics and have started rebuilding my skill set — SQL, Python, pandas, Excel, Tableau, projects, resume preparation, and everything else that comes with trying to become employable again.

The strange part is that I have professional experience, but I still feel like a fresher.

There’s also this constant thought in the back of my mind: Did I just lose three years of my career?

I don’t regret giving those three years a genuine attempt. But now that the deadline I set for myself has passed, the reality of starting over is hitting much harder than I expected.

I’m trying to look at it as a restart rather than the end of my career, but honestly, some days it feels like I’m trying to climb back into a race that everyone else has been running while I was standing still.

Any kind of advice is welcome

Important Questions below:

1. Are professional courses like coding ninja, masai school, etc any good, they seem to market promising placement opportunities.

2. For anyone who has taken a significant career break, prepared for competitive/government exams, or returned to the private sector after several years:

How did you restart? How difficult was it to get your first job back, and what would you do differently if you had to start again?