My Career Journey (part 1)
Like most people, my career path has been circuitous. I didn’t have a mentor when I was in high school or college, but, if I’m being honest, I didn’t seek one out nor am I sure I would have accepted one at that point in my life. So I just floated along, struggling in math and science, thriving in liberal arts, feeling restless and curious and wanting so much to make a positive impact in the world, while at the same time judging and feeling superior to it.
I was considered “smart” because I did well academically, and somewhere along the way, I began to value prestige in a career. Given my natural strengths and interests, I was drawn toward law school. I attended for an unsatisfying year and a half and then took a leave of absence, never to return. I wanted to do something to help teenagers since I’d struggled so much as one myself, and I had considered becoming a juvenile defense attorney*. My wise husband gave me a reality check of the mental toll and meager compensation of such a job, plus I was starved for creativity in my clerking roles.
(*The tragedy of the US incarceration system still haunts me and is a topic for another post. Why do we think it’s acceptable that any human who goes to jail will be assaulted and raped? And how do we think it benefits society to have people experience that trauma and then re-enter the mainstream?)
The next logical path to explore seemed to be social work or therapy/psychology, so I took a job as an intake coordinator in a mental health clinic. The work was interesting, and I found myself most interested and curious about the business side versus the clinical side of the role. After a year or so, I got wind of an internal opportunity with the clinic’s parent company, a large national health insurer. I went to work as an internal provider relations representative.
Working in large office building at a corporation was an enormous growth opportunity for me and was eye-opening in so many ways. I made work friends, took advantage of free learning opportunities (medical terminology, billing, and coding), and got educated in office politics and bureaucracy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was getting my first taste of “employee engagement” as an employee. The incongruence between personal aspirations and values and that of the company is what ultimately led to a mass exodus of sorts when I quit at the same time as three of my friends and teammates. We felt we were being treated unfairly and not being given opportunities for advancement. From our perspective, the basis of promotions was “who you know not what you know”, and our discontent grew out of seeing underperformers protected and less talented coworkers promoted. Add to the mix enormous wage gaps and business practices we deemed unethical, and you had a good recipe for employee disengagement. One specific practice involved finding ways to minimize provider payments (think 10-hour surgeries paid at 5% of the charges billed). We learned the phrase “interestingly enough, Dr. so-and-so, that claim was paid correctly”. I certainly honed my skills in dealing with angry customers.
As 20-somethings trying to build wealth, everyone seemed drawn to sales, so I followed suit. My next two jobs were in sales, first selling hospital call systems and then selling mail machines. The salesforce for the mailing and copy machines was a fun-loving bunch of young people, and the office was one big open space with metal desks lined up, just like in the show The Office. I learned a great deal from a kind and approachable manager, an intimidating and intense general manager, and a formal sales training program. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t cut out for sales. I struggled to upsell, preferring to chat with customers, hear their life stories and challenges, and only sell them the minimum required to meet their needs.
I decided to go back to school to get a teaching license. I had majored in English in undergrad, and my father had encouraged me to get a teaching certification at the time, but I stubbornly refused. It didn’t seem challenging enough and didn’t garner the respect I desired in a career. But, 4 years post-undergrad and 5 career endeavors later, I was ready to give it a try.
I went back to school and worked part-time as a unit coordinator in the emergency room of the local hospital (thank you, health insurance company, for the medical terminology and coding classes). I enjoyed working in the ER, and I enjoyed the coursework in education, particularly the classes on human development. I accepted a position at the high school where I did my student teaching, and I taught English and coached field hockey. I was young and married with no children of my own. I stayed after practice helping girls hone their skills, and I attended my students’ music and dance recitals, art shows, and sporting events. Students gathered in my classroom after school just to hang out, and they came to me for advice and guidance. And then within 6 months, the local levy failed, I was laid off due to union rules (last in, first out), my husband was offered a job in a different state, and I became pregnant with my first child.
Over the course of the following ten years, I had three children (a boy and twenty months later, twin girls), moved five times to four different states, got certified to teach in three of them and was never able to make it work financially to go back to work teaching. It was frustrating being required to take expensive courses and state exams each time we moved, and I’m still exasperated by our education system for so many reasons, including the lack of a national teaching certification. Finding teaching jobs became challenging and, when I did get an offer, the compensation was so low that most of it would just go toward childcare. It just wasn’t rational to go back to teaching. I dabbled in a few entrepreneurial ventures, and when my kids were old enough to be home alone after school, I launched into a whole new career adventure.