Welcome to Pep Talk Issue 1
Before I jump into today’s issue, I want to thank everyone who subscribed to Pep Talk! Every single subscription helps support my writing. Thank you for being here!
Master Chef
It took eleven years from the time I finished undergrad until I had the job I thought would be my “forever career”. I was hired by the Milwaukee School of Engineering as an adjunct professor in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication department.
I dove into my first quarter teaching there (at the time, MSOE was on a quarter rather than a semester system) with all the enthusiasm you’d expect from a newbie. I outlined every lesson to the minute. I prepared readings, response assignments, quizzes, and enough activities to pack every class meeting with something new for my students. My teaching load was four sections of MSOE’s version of freshman composition, one of which was an ESL section.
The first few years at MSOE were fantastic. I loved working with the bright, motivated students that studied there. I enjoyed teaching the rotating set of freshmen courses our department handled along with a few wild cards like Creative Thinking thrown in for variety. The working conditions were also quite good for an adjunct role. Adjuncts at MSOE were eligible for health insurance, provided we taught a full load of courses. The pay wasn’t great, but it was better than what I’d heard other universities paid their adjunct faculty.
Unfortunately, by 2019, I found myself dreading going to work every day. I was bored by teaching the same classes over and over and frustrated by the lack of opportunity to move into a permanent teaching role. I was offered a full-time teaching job with a two-year technical college nearby (Gateway Technical College) and in December of 2019 I accepted the offer. I was sad to leave MSOE, but it felt like my time there had reached a natural conclusion. I wasn’t going to advance my career by doing the same thing year after year.
As 2020 began, I still believed teaching was my career. I worked at a hospitality supply company and in various roles in higher education administration before teaching, so, really, teaching was my third career. I know I’m not alone in professional nomadism, especially now. Long gone are the days when people studied for one specific future at university, graduated, and worked in that field for their entire working life.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly how many times the average person changes careers in a lifetime. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how often people change careers each year, but not how often a specific person changes their career. The University of Queensland in Australia suggests that on average, people might change careers as many as three to seven times in their life.
I also think we are living in a time of great change when we talk about what it means to have a career. Technology certainly plays a role in the ease with which people can change their career path. People can access distance education and attend classes from home on a schedule that fits around the rest of their responsibilities. The vast access we all have to information also helps introduce us to other careers we might not have known existed if we lived and worked decades earlier. Even when I began my undergraduate studies in 1999, I was quite unaware of the wide variety of careers I could pursue that might match my interests and strengths.
A far less positive technological advance factor in career change is the invasion of A.I. tools into every corner of our working life. As employers incorporate cheap tools into daily workflows, people become expendable. Jobs that required educated adults have been lost to the water sucking, polluting, plagiarism machine that is generative A.I. This rapid adaptation of unproven methods to save a few dollars has already forced people out of their careers. It is estimated that as many as 12 million people in the U.S. alone will need to change careers by 2030 because of generative A.I. Because, as you know, changing your career is very easy and can be done quickly without reskilling or going back to school.
When I began my new job at Gateway in January of 2020, I hoped that the change of job would reignite my love of teaching. It was a new place with different students and challenges. However, the typical full-time workload was much heavier than it was at MSOE – most instructors were expected to teach as many as six or seven classes per semester. If you aren’t familiar, a typical full-time teaching load in higher education is between three and four classes. As a new employee, I was only expected to teach five classes my first semester. It was still a lot – writing intensive coursework takes a significant amount of time to grade. I muddled through the first semester which was further complicated by the start of the COVID pandemic in March. Moving classes online added an additional challenge that no one was prepared for. I planned my course assignments and activities for face-to-face learning. We didn’t have the resources in place to make sudden changes midway through the semester.
My frustration continued to build over the next two semesters. Most of my courses were online because of the pandemic which helped ease the burden of commuting. However, I could not get excited about teaching. I dreaded logging on to Zoom each day and felt like I wasn’t giving my students the energy they deserved. Around that time, I saw a salary list of everyone who taught at the college. I don’t remember exactly how it was made available, but I do remember that I was the second lowest paid full time faculty member at the entire institution. I had a terminal degree and six years of teaching experience, yet I was paid over $15,000 less than others who were brand new to teaching and had lower levels of education than I did.
At first, I was angry. Yes, I agreed to take the job and the pay was higher than my job at MSOE. However, I wasn’t aware that my salary was far below the base salary of everyone else. Had I known this, I would not have taken the job. This is why salary transparency is so important – it prevents institutions and companies from grossly underpaying some people while rewarding others with less experience or education.
Shortly after I saw the salary list, I was in a Zoom meeting with other members of the faculty union and a member of human resources. When it was my turn to speak, I brought up the issue of pay disparity among faculty members.
“Well, you don’t pay the sous chef the same as the master chef.”
There was silence on the call for several seconds after the HR person spoke. I don’t remember exactly what was said the rest of the meeting, but I will always remember the clarity that moment gave me.
Part of what had nagged at me over the last few years was that I knew I was never going to be appreciated for the work I did because I “only” taught communication courses. That was what the Gateway HR person meant when he made his sous chef comment. Never mind that there were plenty of other instructors in the same department as me who made significantly more money than I did. I was new to Gateway and represented the direction the institution was taking – communication and other courses in the humanities would be tolerated only because these classes were necessary to fulfil accreditation requirements, not because they provided value to learners. As a result, students increasingly treated humanities courses like a chore to get through, not as a valuable part of their education.
People leave careers for many different reasons. Shifts in industry growth create new opportunities in fields that were previously limited. Remote work offers more opportunities in far flung places without requiring relocation. The ability to work from home also allows people to have more flexibility and control over their working conditions. Others change careers because they feel disrespected or frustrated with their career and they want a new start. Some people change careers for better pay or because they simply want to try something new. In America, where your ability to access healthcare if often tied to your job, a career change is sometimes the only way to get better health insurance and care.
One of the most difficult aspects about leaving the teaching profession was dealing with the feeling that I was giving up on what I was “supposed” to be doing. I’d dedicated many years of school and hard work to teaching in higher education. Even though I left by choice, I felt an acute sense of loss afterward. We tend to tie so much of our self-worth into how we make a living that, when we pivot our career direction, we feel like we are failing.
Now that five years have passed, I no longer miss teaching. I have far more freedom as a writer and living in the Netherlands allows me to work for myself while still having access to healthcare. Talking to others who have changed careers has helped me feel more at peace with my nomadic work history. In a way, having more than one career is a way to live multiple lives. A 2018 study found that changing careers, even late in life, can have a positive emotional outcome, provided certain financial and familial support conditions exist before the career change. I know that I’m incredibly privileged to have a supportive spouse and the resources I needed to reinvent my working self so many times.
If you’ve also had to change careers once (or many) times, you’re in good company. As the nature and availability of work shifts, more people will find themselves in a position where a new career is necessary. Having multiple careers is not a sign of failure, rather it’s a testament to resilience and a willingness to learn new things.
I’m interested in learning how many of you have made career changes? How many times have you reinvented yourself for work? What were your reasons?
Other Stuff
Each week, I plan to include some other random bits and pieces of things I want to share down here. It’ll probably usually be reading, running, or cat related…but we’ll see!
What I’m Reading: I just finished “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream” by Patrick Radden Keefe. This is an older book (2010) but it’s just as good as Keefe’s more recent work. Many of the burdens placed on immigrants seeking a new life in the United States and problems with the immigration system are still relevant sixteen years later.
What I’m Watching: Diamond League Track and Field. One of the (many) things I love about living in Europe is that Track and Field is televised all the time! We get to watch a bunch of the summer circuit meets on local Dutch stations or on BBC.
Who’s Responsible for Any Typos in this Newsletter: This is his favorite place to sleep when I am trying to work. He scoots over until he is sleeping on my hand which would be fine if I didn’t need that hand to type.
Until Next Week…
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