Changing Tracks

I came out of college with an English degree.

Hey, stop laughing! I was also pre-med--I took the MCAT, started interviewing at medical schools... and then decided I didn't really want to be a doctor after all.  Sure, money and prestige are great--but medicine is extremely demanding in terms of hours, ongoing education to keep up with advancements in drugs/tools/techniques, and so on.  I wanted a job where my kids would call me "dad", not "mister Deacon."
Of course, with an English degree, my options were limited.  Still, a friend got me into a contract job as a technical writer, and that led to another contract, and that led to a 5-1/2 year position doing documentation for a software company... which led to another, 8-year position with a different one.

Then I found myself out of work.  And the market had changed.  Despite having 15 years of practical experience in the field, jobs were few and far between and competition was fierce.  In addition, the profession seemed to have changed--no longer were we writers; rather, we had become data-entry and formatting editors.  It's become very hard to find a technical writing position in which I could actually make something, even as a first-draft; instead, it seems that employers largely expect the writer to simply take a draft from a Subject Matter Expert, and treat it as sacrosanct.

I decided it was time to retrain.  I had just turned 39.

Not exactly the traditional midlife crisis, I know, but I already had the convertible and I'm blissfully happy with my wife and daughter--my career was really the only unsatisfactory aspect of my life.  But what could I do?  I wasn't really qualified for anything other than writing, and had no training in other writing forms like marketing or proposals.  Whatever I did, it would be starting from scratch--and that was, quite frankly, terrifying.

Luckily my wife was still employed, with solid benefits, and though she didn't make quite enough to cover our monthly costs, we had a good bit of a safety net saved up.  I needed to make a change, and we were in a position to make it feasible... as long as I had the guts to start over from scratch in a completely new area!