Changing careers mid-life?

[the-real-steve]

We need a thread that has nothing to do with politics

I know a few here changed career paths mid-life.

What led to it? What impact did it have on your family?

I would like to hear your story.

[Ken]

I did lots of non-career jobs in my early life but my first real career job out of graduate school was as fisheries management biologist with NOAA. I worked mostly in Alaska but also did rotations to Washington DC and Seattle to work on policy. I was involved in managing the big commercial fisheries in Alaska and the west coast.

After I got married my wife's medical career took us to Waco Texas which is where she did her residency. For the first two years we lived in Texas I continued to work in my old job remotely as a consultant. Which meant constant business travel back to Alaska and Seattle and sometimes Washington DC. With little kids at the time I didn't find that lifestyle sustainable, especially with my wife working as a resident and often on call. In order to fly to Alaska for a week of meetings I had to fly my mother out from Oregon to babysit.

After a year or so of doing this I decided to change careers in my early 40s and entered into a teacher certification program for people who already had college degrees and began teaching HS science in Texas. So that I could be home more and work in my own community not 3 time zones away. I've been doing that ever since first in Texas and now back in Washington.

[JohnL]

We need a thread that has nothing to do with politics

I know a few here changed career paths mid-life.

What led to it? What impact did it have on your family?

I would like to hear your story.

I don't ever think it was a conscious mid-life thing. My family's needs always came first so I'd pick a job that had a good combo of pay and weekday hours. I tried to keep my weekends free but that wasn't always possible. When I was in college I worked several different jobs. Then I taught for 20 years. Then did some registrar work at a college. When the kids flew the nest I picked up more sideliners like pharmacy tech. I tried to stay away from jobs that meant traveling too much but I've always wanted to drive a semi for a year to be able to experience it.

[the-real-steve]

After a year or so of doing this I decided to change careers in my early 40s and entered into a teacher certification program for people who already had college degrees and began teaching HS science in Texas.

Like a "bridge" program?

[Robert]

I spent 15 years in industry and management. At 30, I left it and enrolled in Seminary full time. After spending 1.5 years there, I shifted to pastoral ministry in the MCUSA for 20 years. After that I left and shifted to child rearing for the next 15+. I then worked as a maintenance man for 1.5 years, then finally retired.

I guess I have had multiple mid life career changes. Leave it to me to overdo.

[Ken]

After a year or so of doing this I decided to change careers in my early 40s and entered into a teacher certification program for people who already had college degrees and began teaching HS science in Texas.

Like a "bridge" program?

Most states have two routes towards obtaining a teaching certification (teaching license)

1. The traditional route is to enter a school of education and get a bachelor's degree in education with a specialty in whatever subject you want to teach (music, English, Science, etc.). This is a traditional 4 year degree in which you do student teaching during your 4th year.

2. The alternate certification route is for people who already have bachelors degrees or higher (and or/work experience) in the subject they want to teach. And who want to get into teaching without going back to do another 4 year bachelor degree. So states have set up alternative certification programs (usually through community colleges) in which people who already have degrees can go back to school and pick up the education courses that they missed such as pedagogy, child psychology and development, and subject area coursework. It is usually a 1 or 2 year program during which time you spend a year as an intern teacher (essentially a student teacher under supervision but for a whole year not just a semester).

For people with technical backgrounds who want to teach in CTE (Career and technical fields) like agriculture, welding, mechanics, etc. you can substitute work experience for college and get into teaching without a college degree. So at my school we have journeymen auto mechanics and shop teachers who are semi-retired from the trades and now teaching via alternative certification programs even though they don't have a college degree.

Every state is different, but that is the gist of it.

[Robert]

For people with technical backgrounds who want to teach in CTE (Career and technical fields) like agriculture, welding, mechanics, etc. you can substitute work experience for college and get into teaching without a college degree. So at my school we have journeymen auto mechanics and shop teachers who are semi-retired from the trades and now teaching even though they didn't do college.

I really like that. I substituted in an Arkansas Elementary School. All I needed was a high school education and a tough hide. These were hill kids and civilization was not always natural to them.

[Ken]

For people with technical backgrounds who want to teach in CTE (Career and technical fields) like agriculture, welding, mechanics, etc. you can substitute work experience for college and get into teaching without a college degree. So at my school we have journeymen auto mechanics and shop teachers who are semi-retired from the trades and now teaching even though they didn't do college.

I really like that. I substituted in an Arkansas Elementary School. All I needed was a high school education and a tough hide. These were hill kids and civilization was not always natural to them.

It works well. I mean who do you want to teach a class like diesel mechanics? A semi-retired diesel mechanic with 40 years of experience? Or a 23 year old college grad who picked up some mechanics and shop training as part of their teaching degree? It is a no-brainer.

They really only have that pathway open for CTE certification though. If you want to teach core classes like English, History, Math, Science, etc. you still need a college degree.

[mike]

My son is an auto body tech and yesterday he was asked to judge this competition by Vo-Tech automotive students. He said the students didn't know how to do body work. One of the biggest frustrations the shops where he has worked have had is the new kids with a certificate from vo-tech or a technical college who simply have no clue how to do the work. One even came to his previous shop with 60,000+ in student debt and he just was not even trainable for the job he was supposedly certified for, but due to his certifications the company paid him more than my son who just started out of high school cleaning out cars and worked his way up. He eventually failed out of the job.

For reasons like this, even high end body shops prefer to hire people with no classroom training because they too often need to unlearn some things and also often don't have much of a work ethic. They prefer on the job training, so my son does mentoring of new guys while at work on his regular repair jobs, and is paid extra for it beyond his normal base pay and sales bonuses. They get better results with that method than with vo-tech graduates.

Schools would be much further ahead to have technical classes taught by industry professionals with a good history of work in their field than by people who only know how to run a textbook and chalkboard.

[Neto]

For people with technical backgrounds who want to teach in CTE (Career and technical fields) like agriculture, welding, mechanics, etc. you can substitute work experience for college and get into teaching without a college degree. So at my school we have journeymen auto mechanics and shop teachers who are semi-retired from the trades and now teaching even though they didn't do college.

I really like that. I substituted in an Arkansas Elementary School. All I needed was a high school education and a tough hide. These were hill kids and civilization was not always natural to them.

I did already have a college degree, but I also subbed in the local school district where I had graduated from HS, but for only one school year. (Attended there all 12 years, actually.)
I taught all grades, from 1st grade up to HS. The JR High kids were the easiest, and that's where I enjoyed it the most. (The hardest for me were the 1st or 2nd graders, and the HS kids. I cannot recall that I ever taught any of the upper Elementary grades.)

Major career change - changing from missionary work to first factory work (at 49), then self-employment in computer technology. (Never had any formal training in that, just something I picked up.)

Why did we leave the missionary work? Family needs, both nuclear & extended family. At first it was going to be a 3 or 4 year deal, but that didn't happen. That's when I started a long period of struggling with depression, one that lasted 2 or 3 years. If we remember that our real identity is just "God's child", those adjustments or struggles wouldn't be so difficult. I think that the hardest 'identity crisises' may be where a person is in a spiritual ministry, and has slipped into the trap where that forms their primary sense of self perception. (It was during that period of depression that I first joined MennoDiscuss.)