Last Friday's Update Cancelled; Other News

Greetings, Detourers! I apologize for not posting the interview I promised last Friday; I know that I quite possibly ruined your plans for having a relaxing read at your desk while you nibble a meatball sub and a bag of chips and indulge in a career-change fantasy of your own. It appears spring fever has struck in the upper South and all the folks we had lined up to interview for last week have made a break for the outdoors.

But a phone call to the frozen tundra of northwestern Ohio, where folks are perhaps suffering from cabin fever instead and more than willing to sit in their toasty warm homes and chat about their jobs, was fruitful. I hold in my hand five pages of notes detailing Leslie Kohli's transition from working in the adult psychiatric ward of a hospital to becoming the Administrator for the Township in which she lived.

After that, we'll have (in no particular order) a long-awaited article about how a wedding and portrait photographer balances her home-based business with a home filled with three kids and three dogs; a look into the life of a member of a well-known, all-female, professional video gaming team; a story about a history Ph.D. candidate who scrapped his partially-completed dissertation to pursue computer programming; and an inventor/entrepreneur who developed a unique system for recycling used automobile oil filters.

And don't miss our special pre-Mother's Day event, starting with a special four-part series on Working Moms Through History, May 2 - 5, and ending with a special, full-length article on Friday, May 6.

That's all the news for today, Detourers, but while you're anxiously awaiting our return, why not take a minute to "Like" us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Happy traveling!

Late Update Today

Greetings, Detourers! As you may have noticed, our regularly scheduled Friday update is a bit late. We had a snafu with scheduling this week and, as a result, had to shuffle some interviews. Look for the story of a History PhD candidate who decided to scrap his partially-complete dissertation and pursue a career in computer programming instead. We expect the article to go up late this afternoon.

In the meantime, check out this story about a Michigan would-be nurse who failed to gain admittance to a coveted nursing school. Instead of being devastated by the apparent setback, Jackie Burrell decided to take a "rosier" path and open her own florist shop.

From the article:

"When I was 24, I didn't know what I was doing. I got a good deal on the store and I just thought OK, I'll open my own business! I had no idea I would still be here 30 years later and still love it."

One Conference Call Away From Unemployment: The Software Developer's Tale

Adrian Dunston doesn’t think his career is that interesting. He wanted to be a computer programmer from the time he was young, and that’s what he does for a living now. But like most people who graduated from college in the post-9/11 world, he had some frustrating career setbacks and plenty of learning experiences. He’s worked in basement offices with rats and roaches and seen three companies buckle. He’s made some very foolish decisions when he thought he was being wise, and he’s stumbled into some great opportunities when he wasn’t even looking where he was going. Here’s the story of how he came out on top.

Adrian grew up in the 1980s, a time when personal computing was just starting to gain ground as part of the American family. “We all liked video games, we all played Pac-Man and Frogger on the Atari,” Adrian said. “I was pretty obsessed with them, but everybody was obsessed with them.” But the DOS games on his grandfather’s IBM computer were different, and Adrian found them far more fascinating. “I could sit and draw on PrintMaster for hours, and you know, I wouldn’t draw on paper. I was interested in interacting with this thing that would do whatever I said and figuring out the limits of my imagination.”

PrintMaster showed Adrian that computers were tools, not toys, but that with those tools, he could create incredible things. “When you sit down and imagine stuff, you don’t see the whole picture. You just see the parts you’re thinking about….With a computer, you imagine things with such depth and such specificity that they’re almost real. And the way you can show it to other people, it’s even more real.”

Adrian took a few courses in computing through middle school and high school, but until college he was mostly self-taught. He graduated from high school in 1997 and enrolled at NC State University as a Computer Science major for the following fall. In the meantime, though, he had the whole summer off, and at 17, he was out to get his very first job.

Adrian started applying at retail stores around town, and the first job he was offered was at a chain jeweler. “I was promised commissions, and there was talk of always meeting quotas and lots of money, so I accepted,” Adrian said. But that evening, he got a phone call from the father of a friend offering him an internship at IBM. Adrian turned it down.

He said, “There was a ton of money involved, but I said, ‘I just accepted this job at [the jewelry store], and it wouldn’t be right for me to turn around and tell them that I can’t take it.’ And I thought that I was making a very adult decision, that I was being honest and upstanding, but really I was just screwing myself.”

The jeweler ended up not paying anywhere near what they said they would, never made quota, and eventually went out of business. But Adrian had learned an important lesson. “The companies you try to get jobs with, they’re not there for you. They’re there to make money….If somebody offers you a better job somewhere else, you don’t have to be loyal to your company, that’s ridiculous. And that’s weird to say, because the company I work for now is a great company, and they do try really hard to take care of their employees… The fact that I stay where I am is because I don’t think there is any better job for me anywhere in the world.”

This was a lesson that Adrian would learn over and over again as he began to seek work in his field. In 1999, Adrian got another shot at the IBM internship, and he took it. Then, in 2000, Adrian started working part-time at a company called WebAppFactory making, predictably enough, web applications. He describes WAF as “a company with no experience and no direction and lots of money…The salary that they offered me as an intern was amazing, so I didn’t care that they didn’t seem to have any clue or plan. I just went along with it.” Was that a good idea? “It was a good decision to go along with it; it was a bad decision to buy an engagement ring on credit.”

Because the management didn’t know what they were doing, Adrian “was thrown in the deep end and had to learn how to do a programming job before I had my degree. I had to learn a lot very quickly. It was fun and interesting, and it was a chance to sit and program stuff that wasn’t for school, and it was a lot of money. Interning at IBM had some of the money but none of the experience. The kinds of jobs that I got at IBM were not ‘throw you in the deep end’ kinds of jobs, because it turns out IBM does know what they’re doing most of the time. But working for this small business, I had to do their production work. I had to make design decisions that really should be made by a manager or an architect or someone with experience, but there was no one so I had to make them. And if there was a mistake, I had to fix it. It was cool.

“And then they crashed. There was a conference call between the two offices, the head of the company explained that we were running out of money, and that if we didn’t land a couple of contracts within a few weeks we would be out of money and close. So we tried to land those contracts, and then a couple of weeks later, there was another conference call that said, we’re out of money, we’re done.” So Adrian started looking for work elsewhere, but he didn’t have to go far.

“Across the hall there was another company called Jetstream. They were a little more grown up. You know, a Foosball table in the break room and beer in the company fridge, and they sponsored a Battle Bot. So,” Adrian laughed, “a little more grown up. A little less money, a little less responsibility, a little more direction. So I started out doing little dinky things, like a food ordering system for the employees. But by the end I was making web applications that controlled phone switches that were being demoed to AT&T. Just little prototypes, but that was sort of a big deal.

“Then one day there was this big conference call,” Adrian paused to laugh in anticipation of the predictable ending. “Jetstream had the best software in the industry, but telephony wasn’t really ready for VOIP yet. So they said in the conference call, ‘If we don’t get more money soon, we’re going to have to start cutting back.’ So a couple of weeks later, after I’d gotten married and bought a house, they announced that all student positions would be cut.” The company folded a few weeks later.

After being let go from Jetstream and graduating from college in the spring of 2002, Adrian tried opening his own business doing tech support for local companies. He started as a subcontractor, but the established company from whom he had been subcontracting was losing ground as the economy worsened and small businesses were failing left and right. “In America,” Adrian noted, “there’s almost nothing to starting a business. I had to file two forms, one with the state and one with the city, and that’s it. Everything else is optional. That’s kind of amazing. I got to be on the other end of what would have been a conference call if anyone worked for me, and say, you know what, we’re completely out of money and we’re not getting more in, it’s time to quit. You think of companies as being these big stable physical things, but they’re not. They’re just a couple of forms on file, and people who, for the moment, are willing to do work.”

Adrian then took a job at a large retail chain to make ends meet, but even those jobs were scarce in 2002 because so many college graduates were under-employed. But then, one day, a chance encounter changed everything.

“I noticed a guy changing a bike tire by the side of the road that I had known from WebAppFactory,” Adrian said. “And I stopped to talk to him, and he said that [his new company] was looking for someone. He recommended me, I interviewed…I got the job. It was my first career job like you’re supposed to get.”

Although the work was exciting, working for a very small company had its drawbacks. The building was very old and poorly maintained. On at least two occasions, the sewer backed up into the office. Rats would often come into the offices at night. Once, during a torrential rainstorm, Adrian had to race to the office after hours and pull the servers off the racks because the server room was flooding. Still, the causal work environment suited him. “My friend, Mark, and I would bike to work and just sit down at these desks we got at NC State surplus sales. We’d sit down with our laptops, sweaty as the dickens, and write code. And it was so nice.”

Four years later, however, Adrian felt it was time to move on. He wanted more opportunity for advancement and the higher pay and benefits a large company could offer. So when a friend from college called him up to let him know that there was an opening in his department at Fortune magazine’s top rated workplace in America, he didn’t hesitate to apply.

Well, maybe he hesitated a little – he did like his co-workers and boss at the small company he worked for, and they had just moved to a nicer office on the third floor of a newer, less rat-infested building. But he remembered what he’d learned when he gave up a summer internship at IBM for a minimum-wage gig at a downward-spiraling jewelry store, and he screwed up his courage and sent an application. With his friend’s recommendation, he was offered an interview.

“Going to the interview at [my current company] was intimidating because [the company] is big and impressive, but when I sat down for the interview, they were just asking me about programming. And that’s what I do,” Adrian recalled. “By that point I had been through going door to door [as a small business owner], so I had no compunctions about telling people I was awesome. And I had been through four years of working at [the small company] on really complicated software that I had to support myself. So I was very confident and technically very bright, and they hired me right away.”

Adrian is glad to be at a large, stable company, but he values everything he learned from his time with small, volatile businesses, too. “Working for so many little companies, there’s no oversight, there’s just two pieces of paper on file with the government. And at [my last employer], I was on the phone with the customers explaining to them why he code I wrote didn’t work, and then I’d hang up and stay up half the night fixing it. After seeing so many small companies fold, I knew that I was responsible for the work. I was the one between us and the customer, between us having a job and the company folding and having to go back to [retail].”

So what advice does Adrian have for college students or new graduates in computer science? Study marketing.

You don’t have to change your major – computer science is still an excellent field – but it’s important to know how to market yourself as an employee if you’re going to compete for a job. “Nothing in college prepared me for salary negotiation,” Adrian recalled, “or for picking a good internship, for navigating corporate politics, for marketing myself as a programmer…There are books out now, books not really about programming but about building a career as a programmer.” Adrian recommends Being Geek, and The Passionate Programmer for career development in computer programming and related fields.

“It’s difficult to keep in mind at [my current job] that it’s just another company, and that if we don’t hustle we’ll lose customers and eventually there would be some giant conference call. Because there are so many people and there’s so much money coming through, it’s so easy to think that it’ll be there forever that you just fall into that complacency. You don’t think about your skills or your marketability going forward. But you have to keep in mind that you’re not safe and your company’s not safe, and you have to work hard and you have to do good work.”

Culinary School: All It's Cracked Up To Be?

If you're considering going back to school to learn a trade, like cooking or cosmetology, consider carefully how you'll pay for it. If a California lawsuit succeeds, it may become harder to acquire federal student aid for these kinds of programs.

From NPR.org:

"Many former students say that with [their expected starting] income, it's virtually impossible to keep up with their student loan payments. Newbies may spend years as a line cook; the average salary, according to the online industry magazine Star Chefs, is less than $29,000 a year.

Attorney Michael Louis Kelly represents California students suing the parent company of Cordon Blue, Career Education Corp. His clients say the school promised something it cannot deliver.

'The model doesn't work,' Kelly says. 'You can't go to school, accumulate $30- or $40- or $50,000 in debt, and then go into an industry where you're going to have to start out at $8 or $12 an hour anyway.'"

Now the Department of Education is looking into ways to regulate cooking and other for-profit schools to make sure the students aren't being taken for a ride. But the schools are worried that enrollment will drop precipitously if federal funds for trade schools evaporate.

Click here to read or listen to the full story (NPR.org).

What do you think? Should culinary and other trade schools be held accountable for the disparity between tuition costs and expected post-grad pay rates? Or should the students, knowing industry pay rates when they enroll, be allowed risk taking out loans that they may ultimately not be able to pay back? Let us know in the comments.

Danny Dunston Takes Leap of Faith, Discovers He Had Parachute All Along

Danny Dunston was like most kids growing up in the 1980s: he liked comic books, playing sports, and professional wrestling. He even wanted to be a pro wrestler when he grew up, because, as he says, “they were bad-ass. They got the women, they smack down the bad guys, they drove fancy cars, stuff like that.”

Like many wrestling fans, Danny was disappointed when he discovered that professional wrestling was staged (aka “Sports Entertainment”), so when people asked him what he wanted to be, he changed his answer to “comic book artist.” But like most kids, Danny grew up without really taking his future career seriously. As he recalled during our phone interview, “I liked a lot of stuff, but I never had any pinpointed interest whatsoever. I liked to draw, but I also liked football, and I never wanted to be a footballer. I never had any real career thoughts in mind, at all, even when I left high school.”

Sound familiar? While some kids grow up knowing exactly what they want to do and stick with that career choice for life, most of us take a winding path to find our vocational happiness. (That’s sort of the point of this whole blog, in fact.) And Danny’s story encapsulates a common theme for many young adults trying to sort out the problem of what to do.

“I never really thought about work,” Danny said. “I just thought, ‘great, I'm having so much fun now, but soon I'm going to have to get a job.’ I thought I was going to have to work with IBM and do computers [like my dad].”

So Danny floated through high school with a vague idea that, as he put it, “you go to college, they hand you your diploma and along with it a job, and that's your life.” He put off registering for courses during his first semester at the University of North Carolina for so long that eventually his father registered for him. His dad, ever practical, signed him up for business courses, and Danny decided to give it a try because it seemed like a good way to get a job that would make a lot of money.

“So I started taking classes,” Danny said, “but it never occurred to me to ask, do I like this, because I thought I didn't need to like it.” But he soon discovered that, unlike high school, he wasn’t able to coast through. “In high school, I would do my homework, and that was all I needed to make A’s and B’s, but in college you have to study and stay up late and memorize it, and if you don't like [the subject], you're going to hate your life.”

“So I ended up really not liking it, and my roommate was taking biology. So I asked, ‘What do you do with biology?’ He said you work with animals or something, and I thought, ‘I like animals,’ so I signed up for biology.”

It’s at this point in our phone interview that Danny assures me, “I do have a brain, but it doesn't fire sometimes.” But every year, thousands of college students choose majors for very similar reasons. Why? Because they don’t think it’s possible to find and pursue a job you really love.

After graduation, Danny worked in the basement of a university helping distribute chemicals to the various labs around campus. While the job itself wasn’t so bad – if boring – what he really didn’t like was the environment. “I had to work in a basement where they worked on lab animals, like monkeys and rats,” he said, “and once a week they'd kill all the rats. It was awful.”

So Danny quit working at the lab and got a job at a greenhouse that specialized in decorative grasses. He did well, but he was bored out of his mind. “I was getting kind of scared, because…in high school everything was fun. I was doing student council, hiking, football, track; in college and afterwards, it was awful, I sucked at everything, and it was horrible. I felt like something was wrong with me.”

Danny later realized that he was going into jobs with the mindset that “it’s work, you won’t like it,” and sure enough, he was bored and frustrated at every job he took. Eventually, he was so miserable that he decided to do some research and consider going back to school.

Danny read a lot of books about choosing a career, but the one he found most helpful was What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles. (Bolles also has version of the book directed at high school students, aptly titled What Color Is Your Parachute? For Teens.”) After completing the exercises in the book, Danny was left with four suggestions to pursue: architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, and mechanical engineering. He took his list to North Carolina State University and spoke with some professors in their design and engineering programs. They let him sit in on some classes, and Danny finally felt at home in landscape architecture. He said, “I felt like I would be on permanent vacation if I could be in that world.”

Danny decided to go for broke, move to Baltimore, and attend Morgan State University because they would allow him to start the following fall; NC State would have made him wait an extra year for admission. Over the summer, while he was preparing to move north, Danny took a class in Computer Assisted Design (CAD), and he fell in love with it. “I had so much fun,” he said. “I have ADD, but I could sit there for eight hours and work on autoCAD and have no problems.”

Danny finished graduate school and has been working as a landscape architect for a few years now, and even met his lovely wife – a building architect – while he was completing his internship at a Baltimore architecture firm. What advice does he have for students trying to decide what kind of career to pursue? “Don't go work at a grocer, don't work at the YMCA. Find out what kind of work you're interested in and go get an internship. That's how you're going to figure out if you're really going to like it.” If you can figure it out before you get to college and have to choose a major, even better: Danny said that "the kids at UNC who did the best were the ones who knew what they wanted to do and had done the research. They hit the ground running.”

But how do you find out what appeals to you? Check out books like What Color is Your Parachute. Keep reading this blog to learn about jobs that you might not ever have thought existed. Talk to people in fields that sound interesting to you. And keep in mind Danny’s words of wisdom: “The biggest lesson to learn is to figure out what you like and why you like it and go after that.”

Life's Too Short for the Wrong Job, But Someone Found The Right Job in Marketing

This incredible, award-winning marketing campaign was developed in Germany for an online recruitment website. Ever feel like you're just a cog in a machine? These fabulous images capture that feeling exactly.

It's the expression on her face that makes this one.

I'm a little concerned about this guy's cigarette.

This one's my favorite, though, because of the details. Bloody kneepads? I can feel this guy's pain.

View the rest here, and tune in tomorrow when we talk to Danny Dunston about how he got out of the wrong job and into one that makes him feel like he's on permanent vacation.

Celebrity Career Change: Jersey Shore Star Pursues Pro Wrestling

Former ‘Jersey Shore’ star Angelina Pivarnick is taking a professional detour into the wild world of professional wrestling. She had such a blast filming a recent guest appearance at a Total Nonstop Action (TNA) Wrestling match last week that she's decided to make a career of it. TMZ reports that "the former "Jersey" girl is all set to begin training next Tuesday at the Independent Wrestling Federation in West Paterson, NJ."

Click here to read the full article.

Mike Shumake: An Educator Without A Classroom

Mike Shumake teaches English to high school students, but he hasn’t set foot in a classroom in two years. He works from his first-floor office in his lovely Raleigh, NC home, where he was kind enough to chat with me a few weeks ago.

When I walked in, I was amazed by the array of technological wonders that filled the room. Three large, flat-panel monitors sat on the desk, connected to a behemoth desktop computer. Each of the monitors was tiled with a dozen open programs that seemed to be constantly refreshing, updating, and chirping. Above the monitors, a large, flat, white screen sat opposite a digital projector that can act as a fourth monitor when needed. Mike's smartphone was on the desk next to him as we talked, and it frequently buzzed with text messages and voicemails throughout the interview.

Mike didn’t grow up planning to be a teacher. When he was in the sixth grade, he decided he wanted to be an industrial psychologist. “I know that’s an odd thing to want to be in sixth grade,” he admits. “There’s not really any psychology involved, it’s about improving processes.” Mike wanted to help companies improve their processes and run more efficiently. But when he finally got to college and took his first industrial psychology class, he was in for an unpleasant surprise.

“By the time I actually took industrial psychology as a class, I was a sophomore in college. I had Dr. Ludwig, at ASU, and I had a blast. I didn’t do too well in the actual class, but I thought, this guy [Dr. Ludwig]'s having a blast, I want to do that. I want to be a teacher.” So Mike changed his major to English with a secondary education certification. “From 6th grade to sophomore year in college, I was all about industrial psych,” he said, “and then, boom, I went with education.”

Mike taught for ten years in face-to-face classrooms, most of which were spent at alternative schools for high-risk students in North Carolina. When he finished his Master’s in School Administration at NCSU, Mike started looking for other opportunities and became interested in virtual classrooms. He started working with the North Carolina Virtual Public School in 2008 while still teaching full time in a traditional classroom at the alternative school. He stopped teaching in a face-to-face environment in 2009. Since then, he’s come to see the connection between industrial psychology and his current field. To Mike, virtual schools are a model of efficiency – no expensive buildings to heat and cool, no wasted travel time for teachers or students, and more freedom for both teachers and students.

So what does a day in the life of a virtual teacher look like? When you hear the term, "virtual classroom," you probably think of a group of kids in a traditional classroom at one school watching a televised lecture being given by a teacher in another school several states away. But online teaching has evolved well beyond what we envisioned in the 1980s. Mike does sometimes give live webcasts, but most of his communications with students revolve around social media like Twitter and learning platforms like Blackboard to disseminate assignments and promote discussion so that his students can explore the material at their own pace.

He showed me his setup and explained how he uses various components to reach the students in a variety of ways. He uses TweetDeck to manage his contacts and get realtime updates from his students via Twitter and Facebook. He has connected his Twitter feed to his Blackboard course so that he can push messages from Twitter to Blackboard and simultaneously reach kids via text on their cell phones. Since most teenagers today live wired lives, getting a text on their phones lets them know that they need to check in with the class Blackboard site for a new assignment.

Mike also uses social media to encourage discussion and gauge student engagement. He often sends out questions about the reading and reads the replies carefully to find out how well the students understand the texts. “With automated processes, I can send a text message out to 70 students, and it doesn't look an automated, impersonal auto-message. So I send a personal message, and the kids think, ‘Oh, he's asking my opinion on this,’ and that's how I get the responses and create powerful student-teacher relationships.”

Students in online courses can be very self-directed, but there are deadlines, just like in traditional classrooms. "Kids are always going to give you excuses about why their work is late. The excuse doesn't matter. You just have to ask, "When are you going to get caught up?" Mike's philosophy is to let the students set their own timetables for turning in late work as a way of making them take ownership for the new deadline…They care, or they wouldn't give you an excuse. So you have to use the excuse as a way to motivate them to get caught up. "

Mike’s virtual teaching methods are so effective that over 95% of his students consistently pass his courses. Perhaps this is one reason he was named North Carolina Virtual Public School’s “Teacher of the Year” in 2009. In addition to teaching online classes, which takes up the bulk of his day, he also works as an advocate for the expansion of virtual learning in North Carolina and across the country. He currently serves on the Governor’s E-Learning Committee and frequently gives presentations at conferences like the North Carolina Technology in Education Society(NCTIES), North Carolina Distance Learning Association(NCDLA), and the iNACOL’s annual national conference, the Virtual School Symposium. Not having to report to a school building each day gives him the freedom to travel and participate in these kinds of development opportunities. He also maintains a blog about virtual education,www.quickedtech.com, and he was recently asked to write for a national education reform blog, edreformer.com, as well.

Mike believes that online education is the way of the future. “Online education is growing by fifty percent every year, nationally. NCVPS (North Carolina Virtual Public School) has become the second largest state-run online school in the country, and a lot of people in North Carolina don't even know about it.” But with budget concerns and classroom overcrowding nationwide, online education and virtual schools may become more common over the next few years.

So what steps would someone need to take to become an online teacher? If you’re already certified to teach in a traditional classroom setting, it can be as simple as contacting your state or local virtual public school program, taking a few training courses, and setting up a the necessary technology at home. Mike’s advice is to join iNACOL and network at the national VSS conference to put yourself on the fast track.

If you’re a student considering a career in education or someone in another field considering a career change, the first step is to get certified to teach, either by obtaining a bachelor’s degree in education (including student teaching in a face-to-face classroom) or through a lateral-entry program (if you already have a bachelor’s in another area). Mike is having conversations encouraging faculty at North Carolina State University to create an online education certification “fast-track” program using distance learning(of course!) which would allow people with jobs in various industries to get certified to teach and become an online teacher without having to take time away from their professions (and lose pay) to return to school full-time. However, this program may take several more years to develop and implement.

Still, according to Mike, there are advantages to the traditional path to teacher certification. “Young people who want to do this, you’ve got to go to school. Go ahead and get that education degree. Suck it up, do your student teaching, do the face to face teaching. You’ve got to learn both sides, you have to learn to be a professional, and the face-to-face school is going to teach you that. But then, when you’re ready, you take the leap of faith and leave the classroom.” So Mike advises young people interested in virtual teaching as a career to find out the requirements for online teaching certification in your state and work on those while you’re completing your first few years in a face-to-face school.

Learn more about Mike Shumake at his blog, www.quickedtech.com, or find out more about online teaching and learning at www.inacol.org.

Do you know someone who should be featured on Professional Detours? Email us!

Football Player Faces Temporary Career Change Due to Injury

After suffering a season-ending knee injury, 22-year-old Australian Football League player Nathan Brown is taking the rest of the season to learn the ropes of coaching.

From the article:

Brown said footballers who went on to coach often pointed out the things they learned as coaches would have been a great advantage to them as players. "I'm going to take that on board and come back a more experienced and stronger player even though I haven't been playing games."

Click here to read the full article, and tune in tomorrow for our first profile featuring a teacher who works from home.

Houston Software Engineer Quits, Joins Wife in Handmade Textile Business

What better reason for a midlife career change than true love? A Houston, TX software engineer quit his 28-year career to start a home-based business with his wife, a native of Thailand, so that they could spend more time together. David Middleton and his wife, Ann, started the business distributing handmade scarves and wraps after finding inspiration in a 2008 trip to Ann's homeland. From the article:

“We said, 'What can we do together?' and had a lightbulb moment. We liked the idea of mixing Ann’s creative talent with my business experience,” Middleton says.

Click here to read the full article.

UK Investment Banker Turns Layoff Into Career Change Opportunity

When Kevin Watson was laid off from his high-powered job as an investment banker in 2003, the father of three decided to pursue something a bit closer to his heart: teaching.

“It’s a completely different atmosphere teaching in a school. I feel like I’m giving something back, I making a difference to the lives of others. That’s not to say teaching is less stressful than banking – just completely different. In my other job the focus was constantly on making money or lose your position. But as a teacher it’s about striving to help students realise their potential. It’s not for everyone, but it’s very rewarding.”

Click here to read the full article, and tune in on Friday to read about a public school teacher who telecommutes.