There’s been a theme in my conversations with clients lately. They’re at a crossroads in their life and career. Something has shifted for them. They’re trying to figure out what to do next.
Everyone around them is making suggestions for that next, suggestions that seem to make a lot of sense. These suggestions are direct outgrowths of degrees my clients already have, or interests they’ve already expressed. These loved ones are even offering to put money behind their suggestions.
My clients want to like these suggestions. They think they should like these suggestions. But really, the idea of carrying out these suggestions make them want to lie down on the floor with the dust bunnies and never get up.
Oh, stability. How we long for the idea of you.
All of these practical suggestions have certain things in common.
- They’re full-time jobs with reasonable benefits packages.
- They’re in existing career fields that have a certain level of professionalism or prestige. They’re “good” careers, in other words.
- They’re coming from a place of fear.
If my clients were jumping up and down at the very idea of getting to do this work that’s being suggested to them, I would be jumping up and down with them. Yay! Work you want to do! Paycheck! Yee-haw!
But my clients are not jumping up and down. They come to me because they’re afraid that the fact that they aren’t jumping up and down means that they’re ungrateful or entitled or lazy or impractical, and they want to talk it out with someone who has no stake in the outcome of their choices. (I don’t claim to be objective. I’m firmly on the side of my clients.)
As we talk, it becomes clear that there is something they’re passionate about, something they dream about doing, but it doesn’t fit a neat career path, and they don’t know how to turn it into a job, and they certainly don’t know how to explain it to the people who love them, who only want what’s best for them, dammit.
And so they’re stuck. They think they should want the practical option, but they almost never do.
Yes, paying the rent is important
It’s not that practical things don’t matter.
I’ve not talked to one client who wasn’t interested in paying the rent or buying groceries, and a fair number of clients have been more than happy to get a part-time or full-time “just for now” job to ease the pressure of financial necessity while they figure out what they really want to do and how to make it happen.
But let’s be honest here about work and how it fits into our life. We have this story that we work to pay the bills, and that that’s good enough.
If the work is reasonably challenging (i.e., not boring), pays well, with good coworkers, maybe that is good enough. It’s not boring, it’s not conflictual, it’s not undervaluing you, and it gives you the freedom to pursue the things you really care about in your free time. (Assuming there is any. A 40 hour a week job takes up about 35% of our waking weekly hours, and that doesn’t account for the commute, self-care like eating and showering, or life maintenance like laundry.)
But most of us got into academia precisely because that kind of job wasn’t something we wanted. We didn’t want good enough. We wanted vocation. We wanted engagement. We wanted to follow our own intellectual curiosity.
And that means that to get out of academia, a good enough job (which is different from the “for now” job) may not cut it. We may need that same sense of vocation, engagement, and curiosity in a different venue.
It just doesn’t look practical
Many of the clients in this predicament have a cluster of things they want to do.
Maybe they love teaching and want to keep 2 courses a semester as an adjunct. Maybe they just had twins and recognized that there’s nothing out there to help new moms of twins figure out how to, for example, sleep train two kids at the same time. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be a writer and they thought academia would scratch that itch and it so didn’t. Maybe they love making and selling things on Etsy. Maybe they’re passionate about ethics in adoption and want to help train prospective parents.
They get stuck because they can’t figure out how to make any one of them into a full-time, traditional job. And they get frustrated because they don’t necessarily want to choose only one.
The reality is that you don’t have to.
The goal is not a traditional full-time job, necessarily. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals. A traditional full-time job is one way to meet that goal. But there are others.
Let me say that again. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals.
Once you shift away from assuming a traditional job to recognizing that a traditional job is only one way to meet the real goal, you open yourself up to other possibilities.
Maybe it’s working two or three part-time, flexible, at-home gigs. Maybe it’s finding a traditional job that meets your needs. Maybe it’s moving back and forth between traditional jobs and non-traditional options.
Yes, part-time work can be low-paid and casual, the way adjuncting often is in academia. But it can also be incredibly lucractive and flexible, depending on your skills, your clients, and your goals.
Like everything else, work varies.
And so do you. You are a unique expression of life. What might work for someone else doesn’t have to work for you. You only have to figure out what you care about and where that might take you.
I say “only” like it’s easy, but it isn’t easy. If you want support figuring out what you bring to the table, check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could do. A new course starts in March.
Leave a Reply