This past week, MSNBC.com published a series on career reinvention in this economy and it made me realize there are a lot of winners and a lot of whiners out there.
With our new series of stories on “Reinventing America,” we intend to shine a spotlight on many of these victims of the downturn who are being forced to find a new path in life, wrote my editor Martin Wolk in launching the package.
The series was kicked off with a great piece by my colleague Allison Linn on how many couples are loosing their jobs at the same time, and some are moving back in with mom and dad:
The lengthy recession is delivering a double blow to some American families, leaving both spouses without a job at the same time. The dual loss of income — and the difficult prospect of finding two new jobs — has some facing deep financial fears, including losing their homes and taking on expensive health care costs without the safety net of an employer’s insurance plan. It also is threatening the stability of some families, who are looking at a future very unlike the one they planned for.
I wrote two stories. One on how Gen Xers were hit by two economic downturns early in their careers, and another on how many individuals have been able to reinvent themselves.
On Gen Xers:
While much has been made of the plight of older baby boomers, in less than a decade many Gen Xers have taken a hard spill off the Internet wave and now have been knocked down again by an ugly recession, one of the worst on record.
On reinvention:
It’s not always a direct route from your present career to a new one. Sometimes you may have to try lots of things in order to find out what’s right for you, and you may also have to swallow your pride and pay some dues along the way.
The final piece this week, and there are more to come, was about the plight of Baby Boomers in this economy, written by one of my favorite business writers John Schoen:
The Me Generation’s twilight years were supposed to be a bookend for the Golden Age of the American Dream they inherited after the country triumphed in World War II. For all but a few, that dream is fast slipping away, as a surge in layoffs and the collapse of the housing and financial markets leave them with few options and little time to recover and rebuild.
As you can imagine, we’ve gotten a ton of feedback from readers on this package, both good and bad. But what I find so interesting so far, is the comments from readers who seem to miss the point, the big point — reinventing yourself is hard but hard work pays off.
Here’s one of the first comments we got:
Re- Inventing ones self, yea right ! im 50 and have had my own business since 84, I dont think there is much hope for a new career or school. how in the hell you going to pay for school and support your family when your homeless and jobless. Bailing out the banks is not helping americans in fact just the opposite, the banks continue and have gotten even worse with their predatory practices, if they hadn’t been bailed out they would be in the same situation as the rest of us instead of sending collections to India calling/ harassing people 20 times a say .
And one reader mocked Sheila Keahey, the woman I featured in my how-to-reinvent-yourself story, saying, “oh, it’s so easy for her to just do something new.”
Somehow, this reader missed the point.
In 2001, Sheila Keahey was laid off for a second time after 11 years in the financial sector, this time from her job as a financial analyst for a telecommunications firm in Dallas.
She tried substitute teaching and even worked as a sales associate at Neiman Marcus, but she couldn’t find her niche. The full-time retail job wasn’t paying the bills, so she started looking for a temporary position to supplement her income.
In the back of her mind, she had always been interested in health care, so she took a temp job at a local teaching hospital as a senior administrative assistant. There she was exposed to a profession she knew little about: medical coding.
“Here I am with an MBA doing administrative work, but I knew it would be a stepping stone for me,” she says.
Indeed, her step down paid off. Today, Keahey is a medical coder helping to manage health information for Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas.
Does Keahey’s story sound easy to you? This woman struggled, had to work two jobs, had to swallow her pride, and had to take a chance on an industry she knew nothing about.
It’s not easy folks. It will take work. I know, hard work and paying dues are out of style. But the Madoffs of the world show any other way is just a big ponzi scheme.
Maybe it’s easier for people to read what they want to read, to convince themselves that it can’t be done. That way you can just sit home and wallow in your anger and disappointment.
But the reality is, we are all masters of our own destinies. We have to stand up and make things happen, and even sometimes fail. I know that’s scary, but it’s the truth.
March 13th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Hi,
Informative series. Hit major points. I especially liked what you said about career transition not being an easy path. It’s not easy for anyone. Whether one is financially stable, already skilled or psychologically balanced- it’s the road less traveled.
When we are so identified with a certain image and life path - it takes courage to break from the status quo. Departing from our comfort zone is the most difficult part of the process, I think. From a psychological standpoint we must dive into the abyss of the unknown, of that which is unfamiliar. That takes courage, conviction and a damn good sense of self beyond the “identity” that we’ve grown accustomed to. It’s never easy - it takes guts.
Thanks again for a great series.
March 13th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
I’m in the middle of reinventing my career, so this is timely. One of the most difficult things when I’m networking and mention that I’m looking for work is answering the question, “What do you do?” I *can* do a lot of things, honestly, but I don’t have extensive experience in the things I think I *want* to do.
Like Keahey, I’m looking at finding a lower level administrative job for a company that’s involved in the things I’d like to be part of. In the meantime, I’m working on an elevator speech of sorts so I can answer that what-I-do question without being wishy-washy and all over the place.
March 13th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Great article…and from one who has reinvented the wheel so many times that it is still spinning. It is never too late to get education to pursue a dream at any time in life. I am thinking what my next pursuit is going to be..and I am a bit past babyboomer status…My friend John Agno has been a great help…Lots of good advice from him on line.
March 14th, 2009 at 3:09 am
The year was 1992, another recession year. And if I remember correctly, the date was March 17th. I was about a week away from my 55th birthday when my retirement would have been vested and I would have been entitled to a fairly decent pension plan at age 65.
That day I was let go from a job that I had worked for 20 years.
Going back to 1969.
It was the beginning of another severe recession (which dragged on until 1973/74). In 1969 I graduated from The University with an MA in economics. During the graduate school I could only do part-time work at the Library which did not earn me enough to pay even my tuition. Fortunately my wife had a full time job and supported us through the graduate school. In the summer of 1969 I sent hundreds of resumes to every place I could think off. I sent a resume to every state in the country, except Alaska. We did not have any children and my wife would not have any problems in finding a teaching position in any high school in the country. After 3 months of job search, I found out that I was mostly over qualified and sometimes under qualified.
Finally I found the job that the employer thought I was qualified. A company was looking for a superintendent to take care of a 51-unit apartment complex in the greater Boston area. While the job title sounded impressive it was a janitorial job and I thought revealing my educational background would probably hinder my chances. I got the job and worked there for almost three years. We were given a free master suite, designated for the Superintendent, below the street level, free utilities and 80 dollars a week salary. But then in those days a gallon of gas was 22 cents and our weekly food budget was 17 dollars. Once a week we drove to local Howard Johnson and treated ourselves some hot tea.
Meanwhile, my wife had no problem in obtaining a high school teaching position in one of the most reputable high schools in MA. (Talk about the inferiority complex. However, I frequently reminded her that I was the only one in the family with a graduate degree and probably the only janitor in town with an MA in economics.)
During this time I learned how to wall paper, do plumbing and electrical work, cleane the furnace and take care of the incinerator. Did a lot of wall repairs and sheet rocking, carpentry work and became a master painter. Most of these tasks became my hobbies in my semi-retirement years and I still handle most of our repairs.
During the graduate school we had some exposure to computers. Main frames were very primitive –special bulbs used for the on and offs while the machines were water cooled to deal with the excess heat. We had access to them through teletypes. They fascinated me. So while working as a janitor, I found out that I could expand my limited programming knowledge by attending night courses at Honeywell. If MA in economics did not produce any opportunity, maybe programming would. I believe, I was the only janitor who attended a three-month night school at Honeywell learning assembly language, Fortran and Cobol, at the cost of half of my year’s salary.
But in 1973 that course did the trick and landed me a programming job at the IS Department of a mutual insurance company that operated nationwide. Finally my graduate degree also paid some rewards. Not only they paid me a higher starting salary but also I got placed in one of the more critical programming areas of the Main Frame System.
In 10 years working as a programmer, analyst and System’s Manager I reached the level where I could not stand what I was doing: I had joined the higher ups whose primary jobs were to attend meetings and seriously discuss what they had discussed the previous week.
But again, during this time I discovered something even more fascinating than the main frame I had first used in 1966. This was a brand new two floppy IBM PC. It set outside of my office and nobody ever paid any attention to it. I was so excited in learning how to write programs in BasicA that I began to resent attending those meetings even more strongly. Finally, I convinced the higher management that I could automate a line of insurance, due to its complexity was still manually handled. They allowed me to take that PC home and in about six months of my time I managed to develop, in today’s standards, one of the most horrible pieces of software. However, it produced accurate premiums in an hour’s work for a line of insurance that took the analyst 3 weeks to rate manually.
Well, that turned out to be the beginning of the end of my courier at the company. You do not introduce a PC application to an IT department that employs around 600 main-frame programmers, analyst and managers whose costs account for about one third of the budget of the company.
They did everything to kill my project. Finally I found a sponsor within the company but outside the IS and in 8 years working alone developed and maintained applications in this particular line of insurance covering 18 States. Unfortunately, IS had powerful friends at the very top and any challenge to their long-term job security turned out to be fatal.
So on March 17 1992, company announced early retirements and also eliminated redundancies. I was one of the redundancies while there was not a single back up programmer of the software that I had developed since IS was not interested in officially creating a department that would expand the scope of the work that they opposed.
In short, I sued the company for 2 million dollars for age discrimination and settled outside the court with the understanding that the Company will have no claims on the software that I had developed in my free time at home.
That software in recent years, utilizing more talent than I possessed has turned into one of the most advanced Web-based Application in the Country used by a good number of companies operating from Seattle to Chicago to Boston.
While I’ve never dreamed of the financial rewards I received of the work I started in 1982 using 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, 17 years later, I still have the bitter taste of being walked out of the office, under the surprised glances of my colleges, to a waiting taxi that would take me to the place where I first started the development of the primitive program 10 years earlier, to my sweet home where this time I would start my own business.
Loosing my job in 1992 recession turned out to be one of the best things ever happened to me.
Wish you the best.
Kurt
March 15th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Thanks Diva! Your words are just right - I see so many people say that big changes are ‘easy’ for other but that they personally, for some incredibly specific reason can’t made their own career change.
Funny thing is, the reason most people give is age: “I’m too old”…. or “I’m too young”. It’s great when people realise they are precisely the right age, right now!
Keep it up