Today on the podcast, Vanessa answers the question, “How old is too old to change careers”, a helpful hack on getting more done in less time, and we continue our journey of self-inventory for Petal 6 in the “What Color Is Your Parachute” mini-series by putting deep thought into our required salary.
What Color is Your Parachute 2024 and the Workbook
Learning Platforms: Udemy – Masterclass - Skillshare – CodeAcdemy
And remember to send your comments, stories, and random thoughts to me at TeachersinTransitionCoaching@gmail.com! I can’t wait to read them.
The transcript of this podcast can be found on the Episode’s page at Buzzsprout.
Today on the podcast, Vanessa answers the question, “How old is too old to change careers”, a helpful hack on getting more done in less time, and we continue our journey of self-inventory for Petal 6 in the “What Color Is Your Parachute” mini-series by putting deep thought into our required salary.
What Color is Your Parachute 2024 and the Workbook
Learning Platforms: Udemy – Masterclass - Skillshare – CodeAcdemy
And remember to send your comments, stories, and random thoughts to me at TeachersinTransitionCoaching@gmail.com! I can’t wait to read them.
The transcript of this podcast can be found on the Episode’s page at Buzzsprout.
Teachers in Transition Ep 185 – How Old Is Too Old?
Are you a teacher who is feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout - or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing something different or a new job or perhaps pursuing an entirely different career - but you don't know what else you're qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search and you just feel stuck. if that sounds like you, I promise you are not alone. my name is Vanessa Jackson; and I am a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal with the overwhelmingly stressful nature of your day-to-day job and to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. You might ask yourself, What tools do I need to find a new career? Are my skills valuable outside the classroom? How and where do I even get started? These are all questions you deserve answers to, and I can help you find them. I’m Vanessa Jackson. Come and join me for Teachers in Transition.
***Hi! And Welcome back! I am your host, Vanessa Jackson. I am a former teacher who left teaching to work in the staffing world and now I work as a Compassionate Career transition and job search coach who specializes in working with burnt out teachers who are ready for a career change but are not sure where to begin. Or perhaps they are in the middle of a job search and it’s just not working. Today we are going to ask and answer the question: How old is too old to change careers? I’ll share a helpful hack to get more done in less time, and we continue our self-inventory by diving into the sixth petal our mini-series out of the book, What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles with Katharine Brookes. This one is about is about location, location, location
In our first segment – All About You - Today we are going to answer the question – how old is too old? I have a birthday coming up soon and it really made me ponder this question. It’s interesting – I look out of my eyes and I don’t feel noticeably different than I did in my 20s – except for a backache and a few other pains – I feel in some ways I am much smarter than I used to be. I have wisdom gained with experience. I left teaching when I was 49 years old and I was worried that I was too old. It turns out – I wasn’t. I am not.
When I had the inkling of a thought that I was going to leave teaching, it was in November of my last teaching year. I turned to what all teachers are taught to value most – I took myself back to school to gain a degree in the direction I was pretty sure I was headed. I had decided that I would work on healthcare administration. I’ll leave the school out – there was nothing wrong with the school or the professors except an overabundance of optimism. I did not find it particularly difficult to keep up or to uphold a 4.0 for about half the degree. (1/3? I forget now). I had one-on-one conversations with professors where I asked if any system would hire someone like me and I was assured my skills were valuable. I started taking myself to job fairs and reaching out. I was told point blank that I wasn’t going to picked. . I started working with Teachers in Transition one-on-one with Kitty and found a job before the next school year started. That job required a completely separate set of skills, so at first, I thought I’d switch majors and finish the degree. Turns out, that wasn’t necessary. I could get the training I needed through the company where I worked.
And as I embarked on this new life and new career, there were a LOT of things I didn’t know. So I did online courses, and they filled all the gaps.
So what does this mean for you?
We are in an era where the degree is not always be-all-end-all. You can use online platforms to get the certificates and additional learning that you need. It shows employers that you are willing (and able) to learn new things on your own. A skill that a lot of employers value – but don’t know that they value it until they can’t find it – is the ability to figure things out on your own. Companies are spending less time training people in person than they used to. Increasingly, training is a series of videos that satisfy a bunch of checkboxes for onboarding. As teachers, we know this – we have videos we watch every year to fulfil this or that mandate - bloodborne pathogens anymore? Y’all know how it goes.
You can go to a variety of places to get training. Microsoft and Google offer training for free towards certificates in data fields and tech skills (particularly the Microsoft- and Google-based ones). There are places like CodeAcademy which are good places to learn basic coding skills, and there are sites like Udemy, Masterclass, and Skillshare where you can learn a variety of hard and soft skills. These aren’t free. There are the ubitquitous subscription memberships, but you can also often buy just the course you need – and they always have some sale going on. There’s a new sale every time you blink, so don’t get caught up in the “hurry or you miss out” hype. Skillshare and Code Academy both offer free trials, so you can test drive those before committing. That could be helpful. I will have links to ALL of these in the show notes. And, they aren’t sponsors or ads. Just links to help you out.
Long story short – as we have been going through the personal inventory, hopefully you are getting an idea of your dream job and your ideal career. With that in mind, you can look at job descriptions for that job on places like LinkedIn and Indeed to see what skills they are looking for. Then target those missing skills with your own online training on your convenience and at a price point you can afford.
And unless your dream was to become an air traffic controller, or join the military because there are age limits to starting into those fields - then no, you’re not too old. Vera Wang didn’t design her first dress until she was 40. Julia Child started her cooking career at age 50. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first “LittleHouse” book at age 62. And Grandma Moses started her prolific painting career at the age of 78. You are not too old.
And if you are in your 20s or 30s, you are in a SWEET spot to change things up. Even though people only stay at jobs for an average of 2-4 years. companies do still seem to like to go with young people that they can mold and shape as if they were going to spend an entire career there. And if you have only been teaching for less than five years, or even if you realized on your way to student teaching that this was NOT the job for you – change course. Do not tell yourself “But I have spent so much time and money on this degree” or Be careful about falling into the ‘sunken cost fallacy. The sunken cost fallacy is defined in dictionary dot com as the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
And their little sentence blurb reads:
"the sunk-cost fallacy creeps into a lot of major financial decisions"
And yes, your career path is absolutely a major financial decision. Moreover, you have also paid in time and sacrifice. It can be hard to change course.
But before you invest into even more things like what it takes to decorate a classroom, or interesting gadgets or apps to make teaching life easier, look around to make a strategic move into something that you can enjoy that will meet your needs. I can help you with that. You can always reach out to my email and we can set up a complimentary discussion call. I always make sure to reserve times outside of your school day so that you can speak freely and comfortably.
Moving on to our next segment – Helpful Hacks. In this week’s hack, I am going to share a hack that may be more useful to middle and high school teachers than to elementary school teachers, but it has applications in elementary too. Simply put, if it doesn’t require a degree to do, consider delegating it. I know, I know, we don’t like to delegate. By the time we explain it, we could have gotten it done ourselves. To get this part out of the way – just consider it etched in stone that anything to do with grades and money are a function of the degree. Don’t delegate that. But there are tons of other things in your classroom that would benefit from having a student involved.
Here’s a story to illustrate it:
Every teacher has to take stock and deal with things at the end of the semester. In this orchestra job, it wasn’t just instruments and music, but it was also tuxedoes and black dresses. It was their first year with dresses, and they had been given some that were no longer used by the nearby high school. And at the end of the year, they needed to be organized and arranged by size in addition to making sure that everyone who checked one out had returned it. In this scenario accounting for inventory is related to money really needed a teacher to vouch for. Creating little signs with the different sizes and organizing the closet is a job that did not. As I explained to the teacher who was trying to find time to do it all “The kids will do a better job on this than we ever intended to.” So, she asked for volunteers. And a couple of students were interested, so she told them what she needed and gave them material and space. By the time they were done it was awesome – everything neatly hung and arranged by size. Size cards had been made – large numbers with beautiful colors. So ask yourself – does it require a degree or involve money?
By allowing students to have a hand in things, you also give them ownership in their classroom. Of course, nowadays, you have to teach them pride in their ownership, but it’s one of those things that takes some time in the beginning and yields oodles of time down the road. And if a decoration isn’t as perfect as you envisioned it, I promise there’s a student or more who look at it and it makes them feel some pride inside. “I did that.”
Do you already do this hack? Did you try it? How did it work for you? I am really interested in knowing. Or even helping to refine it. I’d love if you shared. You can send me an email and share at Teachers in Transition Coaching at gmail dot com.
So on to our Job Hunting segment in our mini-series about our self-inventory from the book What Color is Your Parachute. Today’s theme is location location location or – geography. The goal in filling out the petal on geography is to figure out where in the world you would most like to live, and where you would be the happiest if you have the choice.
We don’t always have choice when it comes to where we get to live – let’s make sure we are clear about that up front. I used to get very frustrated when I’d reach out for help on a chat board and the response was always “you should leave.” It’s not always possible. For 20 years, I lived where the army sent my partner. We stayed in one location a lot longer than normal – almost 10 years - simply because my husband was in a multi-deployment cycle in the war in the early 2000s. Sometimes we are tied to a location because of family. After my partner finished his military service we returned to our home state mostly to be around to help some of our older family members as needed. For the time being, we are tied to our home by benefit of mortgage interest rates.
There are many reasons to not feel free to just move anywhere. If you are not tied to location, then this is your opportunity to dream dreams. If that is your situation, then this is also your opportunity to dream dreams. We never know where our lives will take us. We never know what is right around the corner. Dream your dreams and be honest with yourself.
You can also do this exercise with a partner which can be really helpful for young couple looking for a place to plant roots or for older couples looking for a place to retire.
When naming your places, you can be general with this like beaches, mountains, lakes, cities or you can name names and be more specific. So we’re back to writing things down – or create a new tab on that handy spreadsheet. You can pause right here if you are in a place to do so to make sure you are ready to go. If not…as always, please come back later but meanwhile, listen and let the ideas sink into your brain.
In column one, list all the places you have ever lived. You can break things apart – apartment, house, city, region. This is important for Columns Two and Three.
In Column Two, list what you disliked about each place.
In Column Three, write what the opposite would be about each item from Column Two.
As an example: In one of the places I have lived, there were brutally hot summers. An opposite of that would be that winters are mild and springs are beautiful.
Make sure every negative factor from Column 2 has a positive version over in Column 3.
Keep going until you have addressed every place in Column 1.
Column 4 will take all the positives from Column 3 and prioritize them. I have placed a link to the prioritizing grid from the publisher’s site to help really narrow down your favorites if you want to use it.
Take your top ten. Ask your social network or friends if they can think of places that include all these things. Make sure that you prioritize the top things on your list. As an example, I have lived through two historic floods. Very high on my priority list is a place that doesn’t flood.
Column 5 contains specific places that meet all the criteria in Column 4. Once you have some places, you have some locations to research. You’ll eventually have your top three. Copy these and your top five geographical factors as your conclusion in Petal six.
If you are working with a partner, there are three more columns. In Column 6 put your partner’s top choice. In Column 7, you look for places where you are in agreement or the locations are complementary. Column 8 is a prioritized list of places that you and your partner agree on.
If at all possible, try and vacation in places at the top of your list and give them a test drive. You might find it wasn’t what you thought. I have a friend who got to move to a place that most people dream of. A beautiful place, and a place that is still on my vacation bucket list. Even better – he got to move there for work, so his work paid for the move When the family got there and settled in, it was not a place they liked. At all. They didn’t like the schools, they felt isolated and alone. They left as soon as they could.
On the flip side of that, I remember when my partner told me that we were leaving the state where I’d lived 40 years and were moving to Alaska. Thousands of miles away from family and everything and everyone I’d ever known. I cried off by myself when I had the chance to do so. I just couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t imagine it.
I could never have imagined how much I would love it there. I got to see amazing things, I got to check things off my life bucket list like being in a musical. I got to learn new skills that I would never have learned in my home state like how to drive on snow and ice I had learned things I never had time for before like how to make quilts, knit, pan for gold, or can things I had harvested from the wild. I learned how I learned how tough I was living life at 40 below zero on occasion. I met some of the most wonderful people during my time in Alaska and it was probably the happiest I have ever been.
The moral of that story is that you might be thrilled to live in places you didn’t expect. Be open to the possibilities.
If you would like to explore the possibility of finding a career outside of teaching, Teachers in Transition can help you. We can set up a complimentary discovery call to see if the program is what you are looking for and how I can help.
That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Teacher in transition coaching at gmail dot com. You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!
Show Notes – How Old is Too Old?
Today on the podcast, Vanessa answers the question, “How old is too old to change careers”, a helpful hack on getting more done in less time, and we continue our journey of self-inventory for Petal 6 in the “What Color Is Your Parachute” mini-series by putting deep thought into our required salary.
What Color is Your Parachute 2024 and the Workbook
Learning Platforms: Udemy – Masterclass - Skillshare – CodeAcdemy
And remember to send your comments, stories, and random thoughts to me at TeachersinTransitionCoaching@gmail.com! I can’t wait to read them.
The transcript of this podcast can be found on the Episode’s page at Buzzsprout.