No matter how skilled and savvy you are in your career, no matter how fascinating and cutting edge your work now is, it will someday happen: You will roll out of bed, wonder what you’re doing with your life, and think about making a change.
Few things are as certain as middle-aged angst, that dreaded feeling that somehow life has passed you by or you’ve simply missed it somehow.
You question your choices, bemoan your current circumstances, and agonize over the future. You start thinking about hair plugs and working out more. You have a sudden urge to trade in the old car for a racy new model or the old wife for a racy new supermodel.
But more often than not, your agonizing centers around your job. You’ve always hated it, or you once loved it but there’s no challenge anymore. You’ve plateaued, you’re bored, you hate the boss or the wunderkind who just zipped by you on the organizational chart. You want to dump that vice presidency to run a bar in Mazatlan. After all, life is short and getting shorter by the day, and you realize you are closer to the end of your career than the beginning.
Here’s where some of the career advisers out there go a little hay-wire, pushing people into radical career shifts, urging them to find their “bliss.” I remember watching as the leader of a group career guidance session, sponsored by a service that shall go unnamed, cajoled one attendee-a man who seemed quite happy working as a manager for a computer retailing company and who, in fact, seemed justifiably proud of the coveted promotion he had just earned-to scrap it all because she saw his face light up when he talked about playing the guitar as a kid. Whoa, Nelly. For all she knew, the guy may have been a lousy guitarist. And not every fanciful dream of youth is worth pursuing, despite the malarkey pushed by TV movies of the week. For a thirtyish guy with a family, the suggestion was, in my mind, outrageous.
The idea of a radical career shift holds a powerful appeal to those in the throes of a middle-aged crisis, and certainly these seismic shifts do work for some. But let’s face it: You’ve spent your whole life building up skills and expertise; that’s your career currency, and it’s usually far more valuable in the industry you’re already in.
Now, I recognize that some gung-ho Boy Scouts out there are shaking their heads, certain they won’t fall prey to this dire condition. They’re too enthusiastic, and their work is too vital. If they even smell some angst in the neighborhood, they’ll just pop another motivational tape into their Walkman and keep on truckin’. Fine. They can skip this article. For the other 99 percent of us, here are some tales from the midst of the morass to help shake us from our doldrums and get us moving again.
For twenty-seven years, Richard Dahlberg toiled for Massachusetts Financial Services. Then, when the company wouldn’t assign him more staff so that he could aggressively push for growth in the mutual funds he managed, he decided he needed a change of scenery.
But what to do after residing so long at one address? Mr. Dahlberg decided to stay within his sphere of knowledge, the financial services industry. After looking at posts in two banks and a mutual fund, Mr. Dahlberg got an offer to be chief investment officer in the equity asset management group at Salomon Bros. It wasn’t a sure bet. Equity management had always been a poor stepchild at Salomon, representing at that time just $1 billion of the firm’s $13 billion under management. Mr. Dahlberg wondered how committed Salomon would be to the relatively new business. He also worried about the fact that Salomon was just coming off a run of trading scandals and financial setbacks. And at fifty-five years of age, he would be giving up a secure position where he had been quite successful. In the previous ten years, he had built Massachusetts Financial’s balanced fund assets to $4.5 billion from $215 million. “I could have stayed where I was for another ten years and enjoyed the annuity,” he says.
Don Crosbie, by contrast, simply walked away from his job as chief financial officer of Dallas-based InterVoice, because he needed a rest after ten intense years of helping to build the telecommunications start-up. “I did some consulting, some sailing, tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life,” he says.
He spent a year flirting with investing in some companies and going on a few job interviews before he decided to form Com Vest Partners, an investment research boutique. The idle time didn’t worry him, he insists. He has an explorer’s mentality, requiring new and exhilarating experiences. “You don’t always know where you’re going to end up,” he says. “There’s always some uncertainty, but in my mind, if you have the confidence, a door will open for you.”
In contrast with Mr. Dahlberg, he believes that trying to forge a new career while immersed in the old one usually doesn’t work. “You end up getting trapped,” he says.
While Mr. Crosbie would appear to have made a radical break, closer scrutiny reveals that his new job trades on his well-developed financial analysis skills. “It wasn’t as if I were going to be an astronaut,” he says.
Many midlifers, fearful that opportunities will dwindle with age, grab the first job that seems to offer change. Take your time and “evaluate a number of situations,” Mr. Dahlberg advises. “You have to find the right fit for you.”
If you want a more dramatic change, you have to do something drastic.
After sixteen years in the building materials business, Hoyt Gier was uneasy. The senior sales executive was paid well, enjoyed his job, and figured he had a reasonable shot at the CEO post. But, “I went to work for a Canadian firm, which was bought by Belgians, which was bought by Germans,” he says. “I didn’t want to wake up at fifty with someone in Brussels or Heidelberg or Seattle deciding our unit made no sense; that petrified me.”
But he wondered how marketable he would be. “I worked for different companies, but to someone outside the industry, it would look as if I’d been doing the same thing my whole career,” he explains. So, at age forty, he quit his six-figure job in Seattle and schlepped his wife and three young children to Hanover, New Hampshire, and Dart-mouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business for an MBA. It cost him about $250,000 in tuition and lost income, which he paid for by selling his Redmond, Washington, home. The move puzzled his bosses, he says. Even his parents questioned his judgment.
In industries such as investment banking and consulting, the MBA is practically a required entry card for those with management ambitions -especially for those coming from completely different backgrounds. As Mr. Gier notes, “You simply can’t get from where I started to where I am going without coming through here.” Or someplace like it. He adds: “To break into something completely different, you have to do something to catch someone’s attention.”
Is an MBA a panacea for middle-aged managers foundering in a sea of uncertainty? Is this the way for them to overcome the reluctance of companies to invest in managers with gray hair who command six-figure incomes?
Of course not.
Some lack the inclination to return to an intense school program at such an advanced age. In some industries, also, the degree would provide only a marginal benefit. Before making such a precipitous and expensive leap, study the backgrounds of the people who are successful in your company or industry of choice. Are they MBA holders? What gaps exist between their experiences and skills and yours, and are there simpler and less expensive ways to fill those gaps?
Still, for managers seeking a midcourse correction, MBAs mean exposure to a wider range of possibilities and a widely accepted credential. With high demand for MBA holders, companies start recruiting early. In his second week of classes, Mr. Gier recalls presentations by Ford, Microsoft, Dell, and Morgan Stanley. He soon discovered the world of private client services.
It was just the kind of relationship-driven business he wanted. Following a summer internship with Goldman, Sachs, he accepted the firm’s offer of full-time employment after graduation. He couldn’t be happier about it. “Tuck exposed me to many business possibilities new to me or previously thought to be out of reach,” he says. “The business world looks a lot bigger to me now than it did just a couple of years ago.”
Throughout his transition, Mr. Gier’s age wasn’t as much of an issue as he feared. Interviewers never mentioned it directly, choosing instead to ask how he would feel working with or reporting to a twenty-seven-year-old. “My response was, ‘If I didn’t think I could run with these people in the workforce, I wouldn’t have come here,’” Mr. Gier says.
Still, he acknowledges that his path isn’t for everybody. The tough, competitive environment of the school-he worked late most nights on group projects-is exhausting. And if you can’t land in one of the better schools, he advises, forget it. “An MBA from a top school opens doors other MBAs do not,” he says.
June 6th, 2011 | 
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