One Good Career Deserves Another - Right Management

EDUCATION LIFE SUPPLEMENT
One Good Career Deserves Another
By LISA BELKIN (NYT) 2637 words
Published: November 6, 2005
SUSAN PANISCH has been through two graduate degrees, four career tracks and one
corporate training program during her zigzagging career. Of all those, her stint on Wall
Street was the low point.
Looking back, she's not sure what possessed her in the first place. She had been working
in television production and found herself ''itching to do something else,'' she says of her
(very brief) detour into banking. It wasn't until she was well into training at Smith Barney
that she really had a sense of what she was changing to. She left after nine months,
closing one early chapter in the search for the right career.
Time was, you made just one choice about what you wanted to be when you grew up --
and you made it by sophomore year of college. But now, nearly everything about the
working world has changed: we live longer and work older and burn out more often; we
get little loyalty from our companies and give little in return; industries rise and fall like
roller coasters; being peripatetic is considered a résumé enhancement, not a red flag.
That means more workers are making a succession of career choices. According to a
2004 survey by the University of Phoenix, whose emphasis is adult education programs,
58 percent of workers have changed their careers (not just their jobs) and more than half
of those have done so more than once.
These ''recareerists'' are transforming education -- leading to all manner of continuing
education classes, online universities, certificates and graduate degrees designed to
qualify workers to do something completely new. Adults age 25 and older now account
for more than a third of those enrolled at degree-granting institutions, according to the
National Center for Education Statistics. Their presence will continue to make itself felt.
Enrollment is projected to increase 13 percent among 25- to 29-year-olds and 23 percent
among 30- to 34-year-olds by 2014.
This constant recalibration of a working life can be fulfilling, providing constant
opportunity for personal and financial growth. But it can also be full of land mines, as
Ms. Panisch learned. Each opportunity for choice is an opportunity to choose either well
or poorly. There are many stories of transformation, but there are also stories of regret,
poor planning and bad luck.

Some educators warn that visions of a career transformation can be naïve. Doors close
over time. Prospects are limited by lack of experience. ''The notion of the unbounded
career,'' says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania, ''is pure myth.''
Anna Ivey, a career counselor who specializes in law and business school, advises her
clients to talk to people already doing the job about the market and the downside --
tedium, layoff rates, financial instability -- as well as the attractions.
''You have to have positive and well-researched reasons for making the change,'' says Ms.
Ivey. (She is a career changer herself, having been a lawyer and dean of admissions at the
University of Chicago Law School; she didn't like the hours or inflexibility.) ''Make sure
you are not just fleeing your old job,'' she says. ''It's very easy to romanticize other jobs
and other careers if you're stewing away at your desk and plotting your escape.''
It was that need to flee that led Ms. Panisch, now 50 and living in Connecticut, to take
her early misstep. Sports television had been her goal since high school. With an
undergraduate degree from Syracuse University and a master's in journalism from
Northwestern, she spent a few years at a PBS station before finding herself at ABC
Sports, producing at the Olympics, N.F.L. games and basketball tournaments. ''This was a
dream come true for me,'' she says.
At least it was at first.
After a few years, ''my interests changed, they morphed,'' she says. ''There was constant
travel, the atmosphere was pretty rowdy, there was no intellectual satisfaction for me, I
didn't have a life. I didn't want to be 40 and still doing sports production in the back of a
truck.''
She tried to switch from television producing, which is about logistics and execution, to
television programming, which is about development and deal-making. ''I interviewed for
positions in programming but I couldn't get it,'' she says. ''People see you one way.''
After nearly 10 years in the business, she was laid off and decided to try something
completely different, at Smith Barney. ''I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I
didn't really know a thing,'' she says. ''It was a lot of sales, a lot of cold calling. I don't
think I am truly a salesperson.''
Of course, it didn't help that she started on this new path the day before Black Tuesday in
1987.
Her decision to leave TV production was right, she sees with hindsight, but her
impulsiveness was wrong. Experts agree, and a growing industry of consultants has
sprung up to help with the planning and decisions. Robert DeLaney used such a service
two years ago when he was thinking about becoming a teacher.

At the time he was a real estate broker in Boston. He had recently turned 50, and ''my
best years as a broker were behind me,'' he says. ''I had accomplished what I wanted to in
brokerage, found myself lacking in motivation, and you have to be motivated in that
industry. It's a hustle. I needed to change, and I'm not good at change.''
He signed on with New Directions, a Boston-based career counseling company at the
expensive end of the spectrum, with rates starting at $30,000 and clients who are
successful executives looking for a change. (Cheaper advice is available out there, from
hundreds of dollars to a couple thousand, depending on services provided.) For that
money, Mr. DeLaney spent three months ''looking under the hood to find out what I am
really all about,'' he says.
He met with a psychologist and took a battery of tests, including the Myers-Briggs, to
evaluate his working personality type. A counselor interviewed Mr. DeLaney as well as
people who knew different facets of him -- a former boss, a longtime secretary, a fellow
volunteer at a charitable organization, a client. In the end, he was told he didn't believe
strongly enough in his ability to be a good teacher, so he wouldn't be one, given his
psychological makeup. (''I'd taught Sunday school,'' he says, ''and I was a pretty lousy
teacher, to be honest.'')
The analysis led, to his surprise, to a different part of real estate -- development. In that
way he is typical of career changers. Most workers who set out to change their lives wind
up in positions related to the ones they left, according to Right Management Consultants.
In a survey of 5,600 displaced workers polled by the company last year, 56 percent said
they wanted to do something significantly different with their lives. But of the 14,000
people who landed new jobs in 2004 with the company's help, only 5 percent were in
different careers.
But just because Mr. DeLaney did not become a teacher does not mean he did not make a
change. ''Brokerage means representing tenants, landlords, it's transactional, it's sales,''
Mr. DeLaney says, ''while development means going out and opportunistically buying a
building that's underutilized, having vision.''
Doug Matthews, executive vice president of Right Management, says that such less
drastic changes are more likely to work. Taking skills acquired in one industry and
transferring them to another is ''the most common, and successful, type of career shift,''
he says.
Mr. DeLaney has just finished a master's program in real estate at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, studying the theory and practice of environmentally responsible
land development. He is starting his own business, building retail and housing space in
the Southwest.
Ms. Panisch did the same self-examination as Mr. DeLaney without paying a professional
adviser. After fleeing her banking training program, she ''went straight back into

television production, because it's what I knew how to do,'' she says, determined that her
next move would be more deliberate.
She knew the goal -- a more professional, management-level, deal-making life. Over the
next seven years, she paid close attention to the backgrounds of those who did that kind
of work, and went on ''informational interviews,'' in which the stated goal was not to land
a job but to get advice.
Her conclusion was that she needed either a law degree or a business degree, and she
found the former more appealing. She had just turned 37 when she entered the Benjamin
N. Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University, and by taking extra courses every
semester, she finished in two and a half years.
''I was older,'' she says of her rush to graduate. ''I wanted to make the pain level as low as
possible.''
Still, it was painful. Many older students report back that master's degree programs and
professional schools are far more demanding than the undergraduate years of memory,
and Ms. Panisch was exhausted.
''There were times I would wake up so fatigued I couldn't put one foot in front of the
other,'' she says. ''The volume of work was difficult. I had been out a long time, and I had
to rethink studying again.''
Mr. DeLaney agrees. ''The first semester was very difficult,'' he recalls. ''You had to dig
in and do the reading, do the work. The energy level of youth is impressive. I was the
tortoise among the hares. I did my reading, I did my homework. I wasn't off drinking at
night with a bunch of 30-year-olds. I have three kids. I was home asleep.''
Most adult students have to juggle work and school. That approach brings one form of
stress. The alternative brings another. Because Ms. Panisch quit work and went to law
school full time, she financed nearly all of her education with loans, emerging from law
school deeply in debt.
Ms. Panisch did think she would enter the world of law when she graduated, and even
prepared for it by working for a judge and clerking at a law firm while in school. But
even the most careful consideration does not mean the road into a new life will be linear.
The realization slowly dawned that the law was not for her, at least not by that point in
her life.
''I saw that it was going to be very hard at my age to get a job in a law firm,'' she says.
''And I also started coming to terms with the type of person I am. I'm entrepreneurial,
free-floating. Having to calculate billing every half-hour, or be confrontational and
adversarial, that just wasn't for me.'' Her conclusion was: ''I really just need to go back
into what I loved, television.'' Though she was still not trained in programming, she now

had an extra wallop on her résumé in the form of a law degree. On the other hand, she
also had dues to pay (not to mention mounting debts from loans).
So she spent the next year or two working three jobs: one -- a weekend job doing
television production -- was familiar. The second -- legal auditing -- paid some bills. The
third -- as a freelance consultant in programming to the new Outdoor Life Network, a
cable channel based in Stamford, Conn. -- was the least remunerative. But it got her foot
in the door.
''You have to be willing to start at the bottom of the totem pole,'' she says. ''That's hard.''
Alfrieda Sparks, who is in her late 40's, is learning just how hard. For decades she was a
flight attendant, first for T.W.A., then for American. In 1986, an airline strike spurred her
to enroll at Queens College, part of the City University of New York, to get her college
degree. She chose accounting as a major because she enjoyed keeping her checkbook
balanced. She had no need to use that degree, however, until 2003, when she was laid off
from her job in an ailing industry.
Her first instinct was to look for another airline job. After months of futile effort, Ms.
Sparks brushed up on accounting courses, took the C.P.A. exam and set out to find a job
as an accountant. She didn't even send résumés to the large accounting firms, assuming
they would not want to hire an older woman with no experience in the field. She sent a
résumé to the Internal Revenue Service, and never received a response, and to some small
firms, which did not answer her, either.
She went to job fair after job fair, and eventually met a recruiter with the accounting firm
Grant Thornton, which accepted her into its training program. She was offered the
position last fall, but did not begin working at the firm until this September because the
rest of the trainees were June college graduates.
''I think they looked at me as being their mother,'' she says of the initial reaction of her
new colleagues. ''Yes, I'm the same entry level as kids out of college. I'm not letting it
bother me. I'm just happy to be here.''
If the bottom rung is a necessary start for recareerists, the trip up the ladder can be faster
the second time around. Susan Panisch is an example of that. Her gamble with the
Outdoor Life Network paid off, literally, in that she erased her law school debt in three
years. It also paid off in other ways, leading to a full-time job and then to her current
position as the network's vice president for original programming, which, she says, is
exactly the kind of work that she wanted in the beginning.
''The road back out of law school was not easy for me,'' Ms. Panisch recalls. ''I do see the
results now, but you have to be patient. One thing my education did for me was enable
people to see me differently. People look at you as one thing; it's pretty hard to change
how they see. I had to totally retool myself.''