Changing careers
Comparison/contrast, research
A career must be rewarding and challenging or else why pursue it? I’ve recently reentered the travel business after being laid off nearly a year. During the gap I held various temporary jobs and had a lot of time to consider what makes a job satisfying. Besides salary issues, the work must be important and have value. Finally, I need to feel like I am making a difference in the world.
A year ago I was at an employment crossroads because of September 11. After being laid off from a great job with a great salary, I took any work I could find. Most of the jobs were clerical. At one, all I did was pull out mortgage files from one storage room in the morning and put them away in a different storage room in the afternoon. The two questions I was asked nearly every day were, “Frankie, are you pulling files?” and “Frankie, are you filing?” These questions were as mindless as the work I was doing, but the job paid better than unemployment.
I also worked in data entry and at the Registrar of Voters (ROV) in Oakland. The data entry job involved recording numbers for an end-of-year poster audit. The typing was tedious and meaningless, but the work at ROV was much more interesting. I helped voters find their polling places on Election Day and answered questions in person and on the phone. I also mailed absentee ballots and input voter registration cards. A city council candidate decided to pick up a few thousand registration cards and return them with his home address as the mailing address. This little game caught the manager’s attention and the District Attorney’s attention as well.
I also verified signatures on election petitions. We discovered that two people who were collecting signatures were signing the names of random registered voters. The addresses of these voters were written with the same hand but the signatures didn’t match ones on file. The job was fun, the primaries were a hoot and the scandals were terrific. It didn’t pay much but the drama was pretty good and I felt that what I was doing mattered, helped people and had value.
I work now as a leisure and corporate agent and the pay is the same. It hurts my pride that a travel agent with over twenty years of experience makes the same as a Clerk Intermittent at the ROV. Yet the competition for rare travel jobs is fierce among the enormous numbers of agents who are and continue to be laid off. I accepted a $10K salary cut when I accepted this job, yet I’m sure many others would have taken it if I had declined. Money is somewhat of an issue because I support myself and bought a house last year when I had a big salary to afford it. So I carefully consider my options with respect to new careers.
The career I’ve chosen is radiology and I will need to go to school
for two years, full time. In the best of times it’s difficult walking
away from a job to go to school. It’s especially scary if jobs are
scarce and companies lay off workers by the thousands month after month.
A career in the medical field seems to be a pretty safe bet, however, compared
to travel which has been on a down swing for over a year. A war against
Iraq will make matters even worse for the travel business. Working
in a field where everyone is complaining and where sour grapes are the
food and drink is depressing. Southwest is the only domestic carrier
that still pays commission and so agencies charge a service fee to make
ends meet. People don’t like paying the fees and so they buy on-line.
I love to sell, I love to give people their “dream trip” come true, and
I love to travel myself. But the demand for travel is down and so
is the demand for experienced agents.
The demand for radiologists, on the other hand, is high and salaries
are incredible. According to Monster.com, median base salaries for
radiologic technicians are $46K in Oakland and $44K in Concord where I
live. Salaries move up in the 75th percentile to $49 and $47 in Oakland
and Concord, respectively.
By contrast, an experienced corporate travel consultant made $40K to $45K in San Francisco, prior to September 2001. The demand for corporate agents has greatly diminished while the demand for radiologists has increased. According to a Yale School of Medicine study done in April 2000, radiology increased as part of total health care due to the addition of newer and more sophisticated imaging technology. In 1999, Mark Bakken wrote an article for Advance in which he claimed that with the right training and skill sets, radiologists are able to select from an unprecedented variety of job opportunities including X-ray, Fluoroscopy, CT scan, Nuclear medicine, Ultrasound, Mammography, and PET scans. According to Jennifer Yates, head of the Radiology Department at Merritt College in Oakland, each of the July 2002 graduates is working in radiology except for two students continuing their education in nuclear medicine.
With the job prospects looking good, the next question is will I like the job and will the job like me. I work in an agency selling trips to mostly retired and well-seasoned travelers. I also sell domestic and international trips to business travelers. It’s fairly easy work and after twenty-two years, I’ve become bored with it. I tell more and more clients who can’t or don’t want to pay the service fees to buy their travel products on the Internet because I can’t match or reduce the price of an airline ticket, car, cruise, or hotel room. Some clients appreciate my work and my honesty, but others have become more demanding, less grateful and by the end of the day my energy is drained and I’m disheartened with the fruits of my labor. I’ve lost the feeling that what I do as an agent matters anymore.
It used to matter when I worked as a high-volume corporate agent. Business travelers did not want to deal with making on-line bookings and were delighted to have a competent and dedicated agent help them. I worked on the eleventh floor in San Francisco the day the planes crashed and I was on the phone all day with stranded business travelers. I was utterly fatigued at the end of the day but I felt needed and appreciated.
My job is different now. The small fry business travelers I work with buy directly from the airlines after I research the fares and flights for them, avoiding the $40 service fee we charge. It’s disappointing and makes me wonder if I couldn’t be doing something more worthwhile than finding people “good deals.”
Working in a hospital will be challenging, rewarding and extremely different from working in an office. First, it will be physically challenging because I’ll have to move and lift patients. With over fifty-percent of Americans being overweight, this will be no easy task. Additionally, patients will be scared, sick, mangled from accidents, bleeding and sometimes dying. I will be working in an X-Ray department, in the operating room and in the emergency room with portable radiography equipment. I don’t know if I can stand the drama, but I’m ready to try. Patients can throw up on me or give me a contagious disease if I’m not careful, but my work will be vital and at the end of a tiring day I anticipate feeling good about what I’m doing.
The biggest mountain to climb is the one called “Change.” The concept of change includes the question, “Who am I?” Sometimes we define ourselves by our work but that’s not really who we are. Job titles hit my pride button and I will be much more satisfied with the title “Radiologist” than “travel agent.” Another change I will have to make is to quit my job to go to school. My free time will be diminished, but I don’t anticipate the subject material to be too difficult. I’m not kidding myself about the unseen trials and tribulations that may arise but I feel the work will be worth the effort. I’ve already bought my hospital clothes. The final preparations are mostly mental ones.
The other choice is to remain in the profession I’ve worked in for more than twenty years because I’m comfortable with it. Leaving a full-time job during a period of economic crisis is a pretty big step to take, especially if you are fifty-years old instead of twenty-five. But at least the crossroad I’m facing now is because of choice and not chance. Some people say I am a fool to follow this dream, but I can’t see how I can fail. Maybe I’m just being blind on purpose so that I don’t scare myself out of trying.
Henry David Thoreau had a dream to live in a cabin on Walden Pond and he did it with a little help from his friends and two aunts living in Concord, MA. He wrote the following regarding his adventure: “I’ve learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours… If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” I take his words to heart as I prepare for this next phase of life.
It doesn’t take a lot of money to make me happy, although I love to have it and love to spend it. But what it does take is having work that is important and vital and makes a difference in people’s lives. The travel business used to do that for me. Now I believe the medical profession will.