DETOURING INTO DREAM JOBS
Women
under 30 making radical career changes |
 |
by Margaret Littman, Special to the
Tribune
Length: 984
words |
From the outside looking
in, it may have seemed like Charmaine Craig had it made. At 25 she
was a Harvard graduate with the beginnings of a dream career. An
up-and-coming actress, Craig had appeared in the TV show "Northern
Exposure" and the 1994 movie "White Fang 2: Myth of the White Wolf."
She was also the actual person on which Disney modeled its animated
Pocahontas character.
It was five years before Sept. 11 gave
Americans license to look for more out of their lives, but Craig
decided, even then, that she needed more than being the face that
launched a thousand action figures. In 1996, she left acting--amid
filming of a television pilot--to go back to school, enrolling in
the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of California at
Irvine. Craig set out to become a novelist, eschewing the high
profile and payroll of acting, because she believed a writing career
would put the focus more on her thoughts than on her looks.
She didn't start small: Her first novel is an ambitious
402-page tour de force about heresy in medieval France that took her
four years to research and write.
As befits a woman who was
the model for a Disney protagonist, Craig's own story has a happy
ending. "The Good Men" (Riverhead Books, $24.95), was published
earlier this year, and Craig, now 30, is already at work on her next
novel, historical fiction based on the religious discrimination her
Burmese grandparents faced.
And her personal life benefited
from her career switch as well: She and her fiance met while
students at Irvine.
Such experiences are not limited to
aspiring movie starlets. An increasing number of 20-something women
across the country are making career leaps of faith, detouring from
the direction they chose in college, often before becoming fully
vested in their firm's 401(k) plan, to choose jobs that will reward
their inner selves as well as fund their retirement accounts.
A combination of economic and cultural changes, generational
expectations and a more flexible work force has empowered women to
seek second careers before they turn 30.
"This is a trend
that has been born out of a couple things," says Bobbi Moss, vice
president for Management Recruiters Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. "With
the market having unemployment as high as it is, individuals are
looking at doing something different. If they've been laid off, they
may be using the window of opportunity to take their transferable
skills and find another opportunity. Plus, 9/11 had a profound
effect on people's lives. People are saying, 'I am going to do it
now,' whatever 'it' is. 'Now' has a greater meaning."
Kenneth Timmons agrees. A market manager for Randstad North
America, a placement firm with offices in Chicago, Timmons says
women no longer feel bound to stay in jobs that don't make them
happy.
"Long before the recession and Sept. 11, we saw that
no one was sitting around on the job for the gold watch. That is
gone," Timmons said.
Necessity also played a role, Moss
says, as laid-off dot-com workers had to consider new industries
when the technology boom went bust.
That is a shift from the
way working woman once viewed work/family balance. Today's young
women don't want to wait until they near retirement age to venture
down more satisfactory work paths. Instead, because many are waiting
longer to have children than the previous generation, they are using
that window to pursue work for love rather than money.
Having no strings helped Melissa Dodd leave her
six-figure marketing job at Procter & Gamble in New York to test
her talents in a less financially secure profession.
"I was
driving a lot for this marketing job and I'd be listening to
Garrison Keillor and I realized that really appealed to me. I wanted
to be on the radio," she said.
Dodd volunteered at a radio
station operated by the Jewish Guild for the Blind in New York,
taking on little jobs and making demo tapes with an eye toward a
full-time career switch into voice-over work. In May 2000, Dodd felt
confident enough to move to San Francisco. Ten months later she had
an agent.
Starting over meant selling her car, giving up her
gym membership and learning to pinch pennies. Dodd, now 26, also
recalled that her parents feared the appearance of job-hopping would
jeopardize her chances of ever returning to the corporate world.
But Management Recruiters' Moss says that though
employers still value stability, the dot-com crash, Sept. 11 and an
increasingly flexible work force have altered the way they view
diverse resume entries. Career switches that are thought-out,
well-explained and take advantage of your skills don't necessarily
make you look flighty, she said.
Young women who have
embarked on their second careers say that not worrying about what
others think is essential to being able to make an early career
change.
"I've gotten used to people thinking what I do is
crazy," says Amy Gunderman, 25, who left a job teaching preschool to
open a one-day bathroom remodeling business in Seattle with her
husband. "When they just accept it as who I am then [eventually]
they get really excited about it. One of my best friends from
college was so inspired by the change in me that she is opening her
own business."
Jo Ann Brusa, vice president for Oak
Consulting, a Lisle-based organizational development firm, expects
more young women to follow suit.
"Even as the economy
improves, I think this trend is going to continue," she said.
"People are finding that money does not solve all problems."
In an annual employee review conducted for Randstad to
better understand what job seekers want, Timmons has noticed less of
an emphasis on plotting out careers from graduation to grave. Recent
events have only heightened the impulse to try something new, he
said. "After Sept. 11, people started saying, 'I don't know how many
days I have left, so I want to make them count.'"
GRAPHIC:
PHOTOS 3PHOTOS: Amy Gunderman accidentally turns on the shower
during a remodeling project. Photo for the Tribune by Ron Wurzer/AP.
At left, Charmaine Craig at a book signing in Evanston. Tribune
photo by Candice C. Cusic.; PHOTO: Melissa Dodd left a high-paying
marketing job in New York to do radio voice-over work. Photo for the
Tribune by Jakub Mosur/AP.
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