How To Change Your Career
Tales From An Overachiever
By Julie Russell Beebe   

If you have ever contemplated making a bionic leap from one career to another and think it can’t work out, let me tell you IT CAN! 

If I could have imagined the career bouncing I would do in the time since I graduated from college, I would never have gotten out of bed.  I would have called in sick to life or feigned mental illness.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to see it all at once:  the changes from Hotel Management to Accounting and to Computer Systems Engineer occurred over 10 years. 

I have never possessed the intense clarity I’ve witnessed in precisely three people who knew precisely what they were going to do when they grew up or at least graduated from school.  Unfortunately, I happened to live with one my first two years of college – she knew she wanted to be a veterinarian from the moment I met her – and 8 years later, she is a veterinarian.  Of course I know thousands more people that didn’t know any better than I did what they wanted to do, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I thought I was supposed to know.

I went to a four-year university straight out of high school, to be honest, because I hated high school.  There was really no place for a slightly introverted petite girl who knew everyone but didn’t have any friends.  I had lived in that town forever, so of course I knew everyone.  In reality I wanted to be in someone else’s life not just in a different city.

In what I recognize as a brilliant stroke of genius, I knew the best way to get out was to get really good grades.  I ended up with an A- average after four years of honors classes and rode my GPA to UC Davis.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do – and I had no idea what major to pursue.  When I was completing college applications I picked “Chemical Engineering” because I had liked Chemistry my junior year (or my teacher – hard to tell) and the thought of being some kind of Engineer appealed to me.  I figured I’d find a cure for the common cold or something.  Of course I know the cure now is to stay at home and watch movies on cable while eating Lucky Charms, so in a way, I did succeed at that.

I arrived at UC Davis happy to be somewhere else.  I became instant friends with my roommates – there were 5 of us sharing a 3-bedroom suite.  I was in bliss!  I gave up on Chemical Engineering after my first quarter when my report card looked like this:  

There are a couple things to note about this:
1.                   I had never, ever had a “C” on a report card in my life before.  Much less, a “C minus”.  This was culture shock with pink Mohawk hair.
2.                   I hate History.  If given the choice of having my big toe stepped on twice or taking a history class, I would be limping for a while. I am still not sure why I enrolled in it.             

So, with those thoughts running through my head, I dropped Really Hard Chemistry part 2 the next quarter and found myself in a General Education course – Beginning Macroeconomics – that I enjoyed much better although  I got a “C” in that class also; I was getting used to them by that point.  What I see now as irony at it’s best – I earned a solid B in a FORTRAN programming class that quarter.  My advice for students reading this: look at your report cards for the highest grades and consider changing to a major that does more of that.

The next quarter I found my calling and I ended up with this report card:  

Yippee!  I think at that precise moment I changed to an Economics/Business major, along with four of my previously engineering friends.  We all ended up in an unlikely major of Agricultural and Managerial Economics, which was UC Davis’ answer to a business degree.  My GPA went up overnight, to a nice happy 3.0 at graduation.

In the middle of those four years I did a couple internships – in my junior year I did one at the Hyatt Regency Sacramento for the Rooms Division, because I had run into a high school classmate who said she was interested in Hotel Management.  I thought it sounded good also, and signed up.  I signed up so well that I ended up working as a Front Desk Clerk during the summer and stayed when the school year begun because it never occurred to me to quit. 

I also did an internship for a stockbroker.  What that taught me was a bit about investing and that I never wanted to be a stockbroker.

Graduation tumbled down upon me and again, I stayed at the Hyatt as I jealously watched friends disappear to jobs in The City.  I trapped myself in a self-created bubble of security and just stayed put. 

Somewhere in the depths of my soul, I yearned to move!  To explore!  To entertain crazy thoughts!  I interviewed with a few non-Sacramento companies but nobody wanted me.  I convinced myself that I wanted to be in Hotel Management.  Someone in Management recognized my potential, or being a devout overachiever, I applied for it, and I was promoted to Front Desk Supervisor.  Inside my head I wanted to do more.  I applied my tenacious workaholic people-pleasing skills to my new job and was recognized as “Supervisor of the Year.”

Then a Front Desk Assistant Manager position manifested and I of course applied, as I wanted to climb the ladder regardless of whether or not it was the right ladder.  I applied along with a guy named Craig.  I had been with Hyatt much longer than Craig, but he was a full athletic foot taller than me and was polished.  Craig won; I lost.  I felt pissed off and unappreciated at the time; now I’m grateful.  I could have been stuck as a career Hotel Manager!

So I began plotting my next move: to the Hotel Accounting Department.  They didn’t wear uniforms.  They had weekends off.  They only worked 8 hours a day.  I started selling  myself to the people I knew up there – including the Controller, a nice woman named Anne.  I told them all my degree was in Economics with an emphasis in Accounting.  I figured since I took 4 Accounting classes that counted as an “emphasis.”  An Accounts Receivable position showed up one day and I slid right into it with a brief interview.

After I’d been there a month or so I became anxious to improve!  To stir up!  To innovate!  I excited a few people in Accounting for a little bit, but after a few more months I was bored again and craved something more.  I figured that “more” should still be in Accounting and started feverishly scanning the Help Wanted ads in the local newspaper.

I went on a few interviews and found something that my skills (but perhaps not my soul) matched perfectly.  It was an Assistant Controller position at another hotel.  It turned out to be another Accounts Receivable position with a glamorous title – and I was young and blinded easily by the title.  I learned little companies are big on titles to compensate for being small on money.  I was there about a year before I started craving more Career Change.

Life pretty much changed for me when I met my first husband’s friend Neil.  I really hated him when I first met him – the kind of gut-hate when you know it’s because of a jealousy that they are something you wish you could be. 

Neil is one of those people who gets IT.  He gets that life is movement and incumbent  stuff needs to be shaken up and fluffed like flat feather pillows to give them new life.  Neil was leading the pack of go-getters to their next big adventure to find more excitement and bigger challenges.

Neil started working for a computer systems engineering company in San Francisco.  He started talking about Novell and network operating systems.  It sounded like Russian.  Novell makes a product called NetWare that basically allows computers to talk to each other in an organized fashion that has since been crippled by Microsoft.  In the meantime, Neil had also convinced his company to hire his girlfriend.  My whole body came to attention.  His girlfriend previously held Accounting jobs; she hadn’t done much with computers.  She didn’t have a degree in Computer Science.  She just started studying this Novell stuff.  She studied hard, took seven tests, and earned her Certified Novell Engineer status.  

It wasn’t hard to convince myself that I could do this.  I didn’t listen to the people who said I couldn’t.  There were many of them – and my parents were probably loudest.  In an uncharacteristic move, I let it go in one ear and out the other.  I hungrily digested all information that Neil and his girlfriend threw out about their jobs.    

While working at the hotel I studied for the first test: Certified Novell Administrator: NetWare 3.  I’d never been a certified anything before.  I threw everything I had at studying for the exam.  If I had studied this hard in college I would have ended up with a 4.0 GPA.  Finally, Saturday, the day of the exam came.  I had no idea what to expect. 

I passed!  I considered this a minor miracle.  My closest friends seemed unsurprised – I guess they recognized my intelligence and determination more than I did.  I don’t remember my parents’ reactions. I felt slightly qualified to apply for jobs requiring Novell experience although I had 6 more tests to go.  I applied for a few and my phone never rang.

After Neil heard that I was receiving no responses to job applications, he asked to look at my resume.  By this time – six months later – he had been promoted to a management position and dozens of resumes had crossed his desk.

He took one look at it and gave me the best advice I’ve ever heard:

“Julie, this is written like you want a job in Accounting.  If you want a job in computers, in Systems Engineering, you need a resume that looks like it.”

And he went on to say what I should include: I had helped maintain the office computers, I had worked with various computer programs, and I should list all the exams I was planning on taking; list all that stuff you know!  In addition you want to include the words and phrases that would be on there if you had dozens of years of experience in the industry.

Needless to say, I rewrote my resume.  I minimized my three years of Hotel and Accounting experience to two lines at the bottom under the heading “Job History.”  When it got right down to it, I did have some experience to put on the resume, and it looked like more than I expected!  Neil approved the later version, and was most impressed with the following lines:  

I received calls for more interviews than I’d ever imagined.  It didn’t hurt that there was a high demand for this occupation along with a shortage of experienced people.  I never lied nor exaggerated about my experience.  I wanted a company to accept me with the little experience I had – not for what I could improvise.  I was myself – extremely motivated but a bit shy on experience.

I interviewed with a little computer reseller/systems engineering group in Sacramento.  Later I found out they were having a hard time finding someone but I like to think the manager saw something in me.  They offered me precisely the same salary that I was making in  Accounting with the promise of a substantial raise once I passed the remaining 6 exams for my Certified Novell Engineer certification.  There was one complication:  I was required to pass the 6 exams in 10 weeks.  Everyone else I’d known had taken 6-10 months to complete his or her certifications.  But I jumped at the chance – knowing that I could always go back to Accounting if I failed.

I attacked each day with a medley of trepidation and awe.  I was repairing hardware and software on computers and in many cases my customers knew more than I did.  I went home each night and scoured through technical books looking for answers that didn’t exist while at the same time studying for my next Novell exam.  Somehow, one exam every 2 weeks, I made it.  I never took my eye off the goal. 

Incredibly enough that was 6 years ago.  Since then I’ve moved a couple more times, changed companies twice, and what I’ve learned has changed my job title from Systems Engineer, to Network Engineer, and now Infrastructure Architect where I design networks for electronic businesses.  What is truly ironic to me is that I ended up being an Engineer after all without suffering through 4 years of Chemistry. 

If you really want to make a change, you can do it.  Plan on it being difficult.  Plan on it being a bit scary and sometimes terrifying during the struggle.  Plan on wanting another career change in the future as well.  But if you really want a change, you can make it happen.

 I will leave you with a parting list of thoughts to invite career change:

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Revised: September 07, 2003