My Career Journey, Part 2

So I left the story yesterday with the company merger, where I knew a year ahead there would no longer be a spot for a Chief Actuary at my company.

 

I first hired a friend who was a coach to help me figure out what would be the next chapter.  Then the company offered me an executive outplacement program, and I merged my work with Sue into a program at a boutique outplacement firm with which she had a relationship.

 

I quickly realized that everything they were teaching me about self-marketing came naturally to me.  So I started mentoring others going through the same process when we would meet up for lunch or dinner, and then moved on to offering advice to others going through career searches.

 

Although I started to see that this could be a new direction for me, I still saw myself as a corporate guy, and didn’t see myself becoming a coach for an outplacement firm.

 

At the same time, I was afraid to go out on my own.  I had a hard time visualizing exactly what I would offer, and couldn’t imagine asking people to pay me for my help, promoting my services all the time, etc.  So I instead went out to make a career change into something else that I still loved – systems.  Particularly, large-scale system design and conversion efforts to move blocks of business from one platform to a newer one, with all of the analysis, planning, modifications and testing that requires.

 

Now I had none of the traditional qualifications for such a career change:

• I didn’t have a Computer Science degree.
• I wasn’t a professional programmer and hadn’t really worked with computer languages beyond Fortran, Basic and APL.
• I didn’t have any systems certifications.
• I wasn’t a project manager.

 

But what I did have was passion and enthusiasm, and a track record of major systems initiatives I had led or participated in at all levels.

 

I applied what I had learned about networking and career search to build connections and tell my story to many, many people.  That ultimately led to a consulting assignment on exactly the sort of systems conversion project I loved.

 

Just three weeks into the assignment, I was offered a more traditional, corporate job, and realized I no longer wanted it.  There had been baggage I wasn’t consciously aware of when I had a corporate role, and I didn’t want it back.  I loved what I was doing and knew how to market myself, so what was I afraid of?

 

I instead used that offer as leverage to get my client to guarantee my consulting contract for 6 months.  That 6-month contract led to another, and another, until I ultimately had 5 years of full-time consulting with that client, doing exactly what I loved to do.

 

At the same time, I continued my career search mentoring with business colleagues and my alumni network, honing my skills and building my confidence.  So at the end of the 5 years, when my client told me there was no more consulting budget, and asked which job I wanted, I told them I really wasn’t interested.  I went out to do what had been calling me for some time.

 

Now this wasn’t the relatively risk-free venture I had embarked on before.  I had my stay package and severance bonus to fund my prior transition.  And my consulting practice paid at least as well as my prior actuarial roles.

 

This time I was going to be using the funds I had built up from my consulting to sustain us, while we rapidly approached the year Michael would be going off to college, with Becca following 4 years later.  Had most of my attention been focused on the risk side of the equation, I might not have attempted it.  Instead, I focused on my passion, and figuring out how to do it in a way that could fund our life goals.

 

Not that there weren’t stresses.

 

My wife was very concerned about the fact that money was going out the door instead of in, and what was Plan B.  Finally, I told her that if I needed to, I could always go back to actuarial work, even though that wasn’t my passion anymore.  But I needed to be 100% focused on Plan A, or it would fail.  We agreed on a financial goal and a date 6 months out, and that until that checkpoint, there would be no more discussion of a Plan B.

 

The first thing I did was to post an offer for free resume assessments to my alumni network, which led to 100 requests in 48 hours.

 

I hadn’t worked out the details of how and at what stage I would then offer my paid services, so I only got 3 paying clients, but I did receive tons of experience and testimonials to draw upon.  I made a similar offer two more times over the next several months, refining both the initial offer, and my package, first doubling and then quadrupling my paid response each time.  Experimentation paid off!

 

The second thing was to develop a workshop with a fellow actuary-turned-coach that we called “Promoting You.”  We did that at multiple conferences, leading to lots of visibility and a number of clients, including a multi-year gig with our first corporate client.

 

The third was to create a ‘keep-in-touch’ strategy via my Career Tips newsletter, which I am still producing each month more than two decades later.  I’m proud of the fact that many tell me it’s got more solid, actionable advice than what they usually see from others.

 

I’ve been lucky to have had 3 careers I loved.  But now I can truly say I found my calling.  As one friend from my freshman dorm said at a college reunion:

 

“I feel like you are finally doing what you were always meant to do.”

 

What can you do to increase the extent to which you are following your passion?