For most career changers, just picking up and starting something new rarely works. Most people have responsibilities -- a spouse, children and mortgages. Planning is a critical step in the career-changing cycle. It is particularly important if salary is cut or eliminated so that the career-changing family member can attend graduate or professional school, set up a business, or switch to a lower-paying, yet desired, career.

What's your mission?

If you're in your 30s or 40s, you probably can't afford another false start in your work life. Good research is a key to making the right choice. You'll probably begin with how-to books, and data available on the Internet. But you'll be wasting your time if you haven't first asked yourself: What's my mission? Answering that question requires researching yourself.

Fay Krapf is a career coach who learned many of the basics as her job changed from potter to corporate organizational development manager and business school instructor to her current specialty. Like most other career coaches, Krapf helps her clients prepare an inventory of who they are and what they want from their lives. "I ask them to identify 25 achievements in their lives and careers. At first these clients find it difficult to do." The list helps them to evaluate different career changing options.

Krapf also asks her clients, "Do you want to go to school to learn new skills? What about your salary needs? Will you work for less money?" She helps her clients understand the level of sacrifice they are willing to make. Why say you want to leave a $100,000-a-year job to become a social worker if you're not prepared to live on a $30,000 salary?

Marjorie Long, a counselor at Crystal-Barkley, a career-counseling firm based in New York City, encourages the career changer to dream. "Allow yourself to play with your ideas until you are able to construct a statement of what you want to accomplish with your life. A portion of this can be the object of your work. Make that the mission statement of Me, Inc."

William Bridges, a career and job-transition specialist, developed his own checklist to help career changers focus on the key issues:

• What do you want?


• How will you achieve it?


• Where do you want to go?


• What are your capabilities, realistically?


• What are your present and latent skills?


• How's your energy level?


• Do you have an ability to "sacrifice" to reach a goal?

Take some tests

When John Selix left his job as news director at a radio station in Eugene, Ore., he turned to the career-services office at his alma mater, the University of Oregon, for help. His goal was to teach school. A Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test showed that teaching was indeed one of Selix's strengths; the positive findings helped him confirm that he was moving in the right direction.

Myers-Briggs fits each test-taker into one of 16 different personality groupings, depending on where each falls on a scale between each of four opposing pairs of traits: extroverted versus introverted, sensing versus intuitive, thinking versus feeling, and perceiving versus judging. (For example, one such personality type is the ENTJ, which stands for extroverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging.) The use of Myers-Briggs and other personality tests helps each of us learn what motivates us.

Vocational or career tests need to be administered, analyzed, and reported to the test-taker by a career counselor. College or university career services often administer these tests for a fee, or they can recommend an appropriate independent organization.

Try it on for size

Paid or volunteer workplace experience can provide insights into new career possibilities and will help prove to prospective professional schools that you're not merely an older student who lacks a realistic notion of the profession you hope to enter.

Some employers find "job hoppers" suspect. Admissions officers also are wary of people who collect degrees or whimsically decide at age 38 to be a lawyer. In medicine, premed programs weed out romantics. Nearly all career-changing students spend one or two years taking chemistry, physics, and biology courses and labs just to qualify to apply to med school. Columbia University's postbaccalaureate premed program required Michael Stern to work or volunteer in a health care-related facility before entering medical school. Stern did both; he was paid to coordinate several clinical drug trials and he volunteered in a hospital emergency room.

Dub Gulley took a different route. Gulley, a retail novice before opening an outdoors-clothing store, designed his own on-the-job training program by picking up practical know-how in visits to similar stores in Virginia and North Carolina.

Temporary work is one option for career changers to consider. Temp workers are no longer the Kelly Girls of yore, primarily women doing secretarial and lower-level administrative work. Temporary work, though still heavily skewed toward administrative jobs, has broadened into nursing, engineering and law. Temp work can give career changers a way to make money during the transition period and provide a peek into a different career. It's like tryout practice: a way to play ball without signing up for the team.

Back to school?

Anyone considering returning to school will have to decide between a day and an evening program. Evening programs take longer to complete but they permit students to work at daytime jobs, which is a good way to avoid or at least lower tuition loans. To attract students, graduate business schools offer degree candidates day, evening, weekend and online schedules.

Online programs, which are being integrated into a growing number of higher-education curricula, provide an attractive option to potential career changers who don't have the time to attend class, or don't want to let employers know about their future plans. Courses cover a broad range of topics.

UCLA, true to its location in the center of the entertainment industry, offers a series of online entertainment courses, including writing publicity for radio and television and writing a business plan for an entertainment or new-media venture. New York University has created a virtual college with courses as diverse as the elements of fiction writing to electronic commerce. The MBA program at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, which combines classroom attendance with interactive education, typifies what's happening in graduate business and management education.

Long-distance education via online computer conferencing and e-mail has become popular at the University of Maryland, which offers bachelor's degree programs in accounting, English, psychology, and several computer specialties, and graduate degrees in business, computers, and international management. According to the university, students can get their degrees "without setting foot in a classroom."

And, of course, there still are programs designed to teach vocational skills and get you back into the workforce as quickly as possible. The French Culinary Institute in New York City appeals to career changers with an advertisement in the New York Times telling readers about its six-month "total immersion" program: "It's how, in just six months, you could cook up a whole new career."

From Switching Careers, by Robert K. Otterbourg, Kiplinger Books, 2001

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