Career Change 101 advice: Go with your passion

Sarah Dunn quit her job as an administrative assistant with Horry County and decided to go back to school to be a teacher.

“I felt like it was a job in good demand and you can keep it for a long time,” she said. “You have good state benefits. That’s really why I was geared toward that kind of career choice.”

Sarah lives in Conway and is a junior at Coastal Carolina University.

Dr. Tom Woodle is director of CCU’s Career Services Office. He says Sarah’s practical reasons are good when it comes to career change choice. However, you need to be more than practical if you want to change careers.

“We typically like to tell people to go with their passion,” he said. “You want to like what you do. More and more people are running scared. They need a job. They want something as recession proof as possible. We try to look at a combination of things. We want to help them be realistic, to find employment and sustain employment and take care of their families, yet at the same time, have a certain amount of passion and interest in what they’re doing. So it really depends on the individual.”

Much of that depends on how hard the individual works and how much they truly want to change. He says it’s a commitment. If you wonder about “recession proof jobs,” Dr. Woodle says “nationally, we see that K-12 teachers seem to be in demand for the next few years. Also, college and university professors, business and marketing individuals and most health care operators, particularly registered nurses. We've seen a sharp incline in the number of available jobs."

He adds one bit of advice above all others when it comes to finding a job you want.

“It’s never too early to start networking, meeting people in the field you want to go into. It’s so important because about 70 percent of the professional jobs out there are never advertised. 80 percent of those jobs are gotten through career networking, so it’s important to build that network. Figure out what you want to do, find what’s realistic and then build your network.”

That includes social networking. He says let everyone you know --- and even some you don’t --- what you can do and what you want. Dr. Woodle said, “it's amazing how many students come back to us and say they got a job they didn't even apply for, that they got the call, and it's all through the networking. That's probably the single most important thing in doing a career choice now."

Woodle and the office at CCU don’t just counsel students, but that’s their primary objective, including non-traditional students like Sarah Dunn. She’s taken some of his advice, especially when it comes to networking and making contacts. She works part-time at the Career Services Center, to make some extra money and, hopefully, get a lead on a good teaching job when she graduates.

“It was still a risky move, quitting my job and going back to school full time,” she said, “but it’s worked out well. It was a good decision.”