Have you ever dreamed of changing careers, but don’t know how to start?
I haven’t. Seriously. Except for my first few years in the workforce, I’ve always worked in marketing or sales in one capacity or another, and I had always loved it. Two years ago, this month, I was a marketing manager for a theater company. But here’s why and how, two years ago this month, I changed careers.
I really liked my marketing job. It was part-time, flexible, and the first real job I’d had in the almost-eight years since my first child had been born. I loved the autonomy, the professional identity, the praise I was getting for a job well done. Everything about the job, basically… except the summers.
See, I worked for an opera company, and the “season,” the time when we staged our three big productions, was the first week of June through the second week of August every year. During the season, my part-time job became a full-time job, and I worked nights, weekends, whenever. I was salaried, so although I could work less during the rest of the year to make up for the summer weeks, I earned exactly the same paycheck through the summer while I worked like crazy. Continue reading “Thinking of Changing Careers? Why and How I Did at 36”
