I believe I'm totally lost with my career development - or rather, lack thereof.

Ever since I was in college, I've been heavily involved in Product Engineering. I made an internship with a local (large) machine shop due to my abilities in SolidWorks and other CAD software. I am a Design Engineer, so I thought this was natural, since my Product Engineer tasks often required that I get my hands in CAD to make changes and improvement to products - be them machined parts or large-scale products themselves.

So throughout my career I've played the Product Engineer card, which involved (obviously) managing the direction a product would take based on several factors (marketing, customer preference, whatever). Then I felt a career and country change was in order and I found this little job as a "Project Manager" in southern Germany, at a very small, mom-and-pop outfit. Problem is, the owner had no idea what a Project Manager had to do and me, having the technical background, did not sit well with this "trading company". Unfortunately, I was bullied a lot by the owner and was forced to resign and come back to my country since I couldn't get any kind of protection or incentive to stay back there. By the way, I'm from Mexico.

So I decided to go back to work at my former employer, a known HVAC company, as Product Engineer. But what I do now is way, way different from what I used to do as Product Engineer - I tell myself it's more on the "Production Engineering" side of things (i.e. going over to the lines, getting called when things don't go right and stuff like that). Needless to say, I don't like it. Basically, if you take CAD away from me, I'm 'dead'.

I have found several job postings here but unfortunately it'll be hard to apply given that I've got very little time on the job.

So right now, I don't know what to do. I'm considering starting up my own business, but as cool as that might sound, it might separate me from CAD even further. Any advice is greatly appreciated.