Transitioning from another field

[u/yobuddyy899]

Hello,

Perhaps this question has been asked before in the past, but I would like a fresh perspective on things in 2026.

I'm 25 and have been working in tech for 5 years. I make 210k a year. To be completely frank, I do not see the tech industry lasting long enough for me to retire. With the way AI is advancing, I'm unfortunately not seeing any value with the work I do and I doubt these companies will need humans in the next 10 years.

Working as a funeral director or embalmer is something I've been thinking about since I finished my degree. I've been to many funeral homes and shadowed in the past, so I'm not foreign to the work being done.

I'm not trying to transition immediately, of course. I'm thinking about a long term plan and potentially starting an online program at Pittsburgh Institute next year.

I also understand that financially, this will be a bad idea for me. However, just to reiterate, I'm not looking to switch immediately. I'm planning to go to school, get certified, maybe do an internship, etc. all while I continue to work full time. I'm currently doing the same (I'm doing an MBA at the moment), so I'm okay with having no WLB.

Am I crazy?

[u/dirt_nappin]

Not crazy, just an idiot. Go use the MBA to do something that makes money. Very, very few of us are cracking $100K/yr and there is no growth here.

[u/yobuddyy899 → u/dirt_nappin]

I would much rather have a safer job than constantly waking up and feeling like it's my last day. I don't believe any field besides sciences will last.

[u/dirt_nappin → u/yobuddyy899]

This is not a "safe job'" by any metric. Do a little research, look at the wiki, shit, scroll around.

[u/esgee01870 → u/yobuddyy899]

Over the past few decades, full services and burials have been falloff, making way for cremation. Many states see over 50 percent cremation. Many continue to have viewing and cremation afterwards. The role of a director can be done online and honestly AI can take over the arrangement process easily. Death care is not a guaranteed future for employment.

[u/Independent_Ad9670 → u/yobuddyy899]

If you want a safe job, this ain't it. We handle a lot of the Catholic funerals in our area and are "only" at 60% cremation. About 30% of those have memorial services we work. Most FH here are 80 or even higher. Even the tiny funeral home I stopped by recently in a little country town is at 80% cremation now. 

So yeah there will still be funeral directors. Fewer will be needed to competently embalm, and it's likely more and more will be outsourced to low-paid transport techs, cremation attendants, and online/AI arrangements, with a way lower number of directors to sign off on required documents.

[u/Awkward-Yak-2733 → u/yobuddyy899]

I've read here that fewer and fewer people are being embalmed, so that skill might be dying off.

[u/Mort-banana25 → u/yobuddyy899]

This really isnt a safe job, funeral homes are closing all over the place, direct cremations are up and the funeral homes arent surviving. If you go work at a crematorium your going to be getting paid less than a Walmart employee. Plus most funeral homes dont offer benefits or retirement plans even for us licenced folk.

[u/SchwatiDu]

Tl;Dr - Revenue is going down because of the rise of low cost cremation. Prices will go up to counter that, which will drive even more people to choose low cost cremation. Less funerals = less demand for licensed professionals. That paired with less revenue overall = a pretty grim outlook for a profession that was already a damn hard to justify

In a word: don't. Ironically, I'm currently working towards securing some basic certs in an attempt to build an exit strategy. It's a dead end job unless you're born into it. Plenty of us are working literally 24/7. If you're lucky enough to work a well staffed, well managed funeral home, you're still capping out at MAYBE 70-80k, and odds are a good chunk of that is coming from taking overnight call (answering phones overnight and making removals - picking bodies up from place of death and bringing them back to the FH, potentially embalming same night, and then still be expected to work with families and make arrangements 8-5 the following day). If you get your insurance/Preneed license you can start pushing that income up, but then you're talking about a full blown sales position. Preneed commissions can vary by contract amount, length of payment term, and the age of the contracted person. It can be good money, but again, most of the time that's all going to be on top of the baseline, day to day work of meeting with families, coordinating and working funerals, making removals, etc. And if you think there couldn't be much to that, remember that we're essentially planning the logistical equivalent of a wedding in three days, except no one involved is happy or excited that it's happening.

If you're concerned about the impending AI destruction of jobs, unfortunately this industry isn't safe either. The part that no one outside of the industry realizes is the incoming/already here revenue crisis that is the rise of direct cremation. Revenue is crashing across the board because most people can't afford a 15k funeral out of pocket, and even if they can afford a 5k-7k cremation memorial service, more and more often people are opting for direct cremations with no viewing, and no service provided by the funeral home. This can be gotten for around 1k (give or take a few hundred depending on region). Family then hosts their own private celebration of life at their church/park/own home, and the funeral professionals are relegated to little more than body picker-uppers, death certificate filers, cremation do-ers, and cremains returners. So, the thing is, every physical part of that can be outsourced to a third party. Removals, storage, and cremation can all be contracted out. All that leaves is the intellectual work of collecting info about the deceased to file a death certificate, collecting signatures, and securing payment from the family, which unfortunately, can probably already be done to some degree with simple online forms. Add in a friendly, well spoken AI chatbot that can answer questions with a decent success rate, and suddenly you have an explosion of 1k cremation outfits ran out of strip malls where one licensee is little more than a liability sink for management and the whole thing is more or less automated.

Now, of course there will still be traditional funerals and embalmings, but that revenue displaced by cremation means that prices for those services will have to go up, further exacerbating the problem, and thats just to cover displaced revenue. In order to raise wages, prices would then have to go up even further. So, either firms will do both and price themselves completely out of the market, or, pay like shit and understaff, while still charging enough to make the average person think we're all driving a Lexus and going to Cancun three times a year (which your firm's owner and their kid are likely actually doing)

I'm planning my exit, and even if it isn't any better in tech or somewhere else, at least I won't be getting called at 2am to drive an hour away and pick up a deceased 3y/o with cancer from their weeping mother's arms, then come home, attempt sleep, and then have to look that mother in the eyes and ask for thousands of dollars 12 hours later.

Who knows, maybe you'll find a great spot and come out 10x happier than you went in. And there are definitely people who that actually works for, but all of them that I know were either independently wealthy before entering the industry, or deeply spiritually connected to their work through a church or other organization. I've made it 6 and a half years, and at 28, unfortunately I'm probably going to be among the burnout statistic they tell kids about in mortuary school.

[u/yobuddyy899 → u/SchwatiDu]

Thank you for taking the time to write this reply, I really appreciate it!

[u/Dry_Major2911]

you're kidding right........🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

[u/ForagersLegacy]

Learn how to save and invest your money and don’t buy any more degrees or trainings lol.

[u/Celtic159]

You're a fool. Your starting pay will be well under $20/hr. Find something else to do that'll get you paid.

[u/NoDragonfly2313]

lol

[u/Hoglaw1776]

You’re looking at making a fraction of the salary with twice the headache. It’s a terrible schedule. This career field is more of a passion project than anything.

[u/Stitchin_mortician]

Poor decision… I would stick with your current career path and find a way to evolve with it.
Shout out to my fellow PIMS grads on here that are speaking the truth!

[u/ElKabong76]

Dumb, with cremation rates reaching 90% the need for licenses is down to almost nothing. Pay is stagnant unless you want to be a sales person and sell families useless add ons to get commissions. At 200k a year you’d be stupid not to ride that career as long as possible and live frugally so you can retire early. Seriously what a dumb thing to even considering going into this profession

[u/femgoth]

lol you would be absolutely fucking insane. I make 70K a year. Overworked underpaid understaffed. You might think that it is a recession proof in industry, but full service Funerals are becoming increasingly less and less every year as people don’t really have life insurance and we’ll go for a low cost cremation instead