Career transitions of a certain age

Looking back is looking forward.

Part 15 in this series.

There’s a social media genre in *professional advice* circles with which my algorithm has made me very familiar.

“Are you Gen X?” a very late-stage Xer asks, looking into the camera from a curated seat in his curated home office. “Were you recently laid off? Has it hit you yet that you probably won’t ever be hired again?”

Ah, the hyperbole of doomerism and end times theology, rebranded as career advice.

Follow me for what you MUST do next, but only after you accept your professional obsolescence.

Buy (into) my plan for what post-corporate success looks like, but only after you accept your current circumstances as yet another form of proof that GenX will always be afflicted of their invisibility and the disrespect it creates.

Listen to me and not the other social media grifters of the moment, but only after you accept that I’m the one who found my way out of the job market matrix.

Look, I know the circumstances make buying this line of thinking more palatable. The market sucks. Aging sucks. Corporations and their incessant drive to funnel the largest share of profits into the smallest number of hands is one of the root evils of American culture, and that sucks.  

Being thrust into unemployment in this moment—particularly for the first time—is a hell of an incentive to feel all these things and more. To embrace a bitterness and alienation. The job search process alone is enough to drive all this home.

But I return to the place empathy and an awareness of anyone other than myself provides me.

Young job seekers are watching aspirational jobs evaporate, leaving fewer, increasingly worse options.

College graduates are terrified because they followed the prescribed path to middle class access, only to have the door slammed shut just as they were set to walk through it.

Mid-career folks are frozen in positions they should have advanced out of because the people above them are clinging to their roles in the system.

And the oldest workers are not leaving, making that bottleneck even more pronounced.

I could be describing 2025. Or 2009. Or 2001. Or 1988. Or 1974…

Employment and financial stability are check engine lights, not generational markers. They tell us when the most exploitative elements of our system are at their worst. Just look at the advice the wealthiest among us are giving.

A buyers’ market is coming. This is a once in a lifetime chance to build wealth. Now’s the time to invest.

This benefits everyone, they tell people in rooms almost none of us are allowed into, even as most of us will simply hope to keep the jobs we have or find replacements for the ones their market has taken from us.

Will we be able to do this? Not all of us, and not if something doesn’t change.

But I’m fairly certain hucksters using age-bait to drag eyes onto their content so they can pay their own bills via the flagging hopes of the people sucked in by their *insights* will do less than nothing to drive the change we need.

Telling your story to people who don’t get it

Sometimes being on the job market is like being on the real estate market. “No, really, he’s beautiful inside! So much potential!”

Part 14 in this series.

When the academic jobs I interviewed for failed to materialize, I shifted to thinking about how I needed to go about applying for work in the larger pond outside of academia. There are several fields and positions I am well qualified for outside the field I’ve been in most recently.

The task then: figuring out how to market myself in ways that code for non-academics.

As a storyteller, this would be a fascinating hypothetical process. In reality, accomplishing this turns out to be just as difficult as it sounds. The following is one of a dozen professional markers I’ve had—and am still having—to translate for potential employers.

So, what’s your experience with project management? I’ve been asked this in every interview and three quarters of the application processes I’ve completed so far.

What I know: Every class I’ve ever taught is project management of a magnitude most don’t recognize.

Getting a class of individuals on-boarded and aware of the stakes and processes, trouble shooting for such a diverse set of needs, accommodating various learning styles and delays one often cannot see, balancing instruction with experience with feedback with evaluation with grace, and holding it all to deadlines without paychecks or bonuses…

Now multiply that by four often completely separate subjects, structures, and student groups every semester and I can safely assert it would be the rare project I could not run extremely well.

What many employers see: Whatever their own experience with education as a student told them and whatever stray messages they’ve encountered floating around in the ether on the topic.

This combination is typically a UX mix of frustrations and what was common to their time in the classroom’s desk.

The assumption: Mission fit is probably a problem because you’ve *only* taught classes.

You don’t know corporate culture (as if universities don’t try to operate like conglomerates as much as possible).

You’ve never dealt with team members at odds with each other or their lead (as if effective courses are universally loved or great teachers universally respected).

You haven’t experienced the pace of business (as if productive academics aren’t balancing teaching and evaluating, availability to students outside class, writing for publication regularly, applying for grants, serving on university committees and initiatives, and constantly refreshing their research…and all for less money than most imagine).

This is not to imply there won’t be a learning curve for me, just that it’s not all that different for people moving from one company to another. Sure, there are some elements of whatever system I drop into that will be alien to me.

But the skills for doing the work are already well ingrained in my process. And the people on the other side of the desk will see that if they’ll look for their story being told in a new way.

Jobs in the shell…

Can’t see the forest, nor the trees sometimes…

Part 13 in this series.

On the topic of being ghosted, the silence of the job market is awful.

Most applications are met with no response at all. You take the time to personalize your materials, market yourself to their specific needs, and scrub your copy is clean. Then you pitch it into the void, left simply to assume it got swallowed.

Did human eyes even see it? Who knows, really?

Some companies use systems that are supposed to track status and update applicants. One such system at a major health care provider I applied to has had the same job status “Active – Accepting Applications” for four months. It offers no other way to check the status of your app beyond that phrase.

Awesome.

In other cases, the only notification given is the position disappearing from the job board you found it on. Not even an automatically generated form email to break the news.

Who needs closure?

Still others have responded asking for more info. I take the time to answer their questions as carefully as possible. And then they go dark.   

After that, there’s silence. Long periods where your applications are active, or so you think. Is your contact at the company really following through on that internal recommendation? Will your description of yourself code in the language of an industry that considers itself so different from the one you’re leaving?

Sometimes, these questions get answered. But the number of times this happens is shockingly small, even in the most perfunctory ways.

Evaporation is easier work than cutting a new channel after all.

Funemployment? Sure thing, Jan.

A little more blue in these skies wouldn’t hurt, but not the artificial kind.

Part 12 in this series.

Somewhere in the middle of August, I stumbled on a TikTok video of a woman also looking for work. I expected a set of tips on using AI to make applying easier or things to avoid putting on a resume.

Social media content about job searching is an industry in and of itself after all.

Instead, she was exhorting people to see their time between jobs as “funemployment.”

“Rest,” she said. “Don’t feel guilty about visiting a friend in the middle of the day or reading a book at a coffee shop. There’s no rule that says you are only allowed to look for jobs when you don’t have one. You might just enjoy yourself. And when will you have this opportunity again?”

The next morning, I filed for unemployment benefits. Another first in my professional life.

We have a house to feed. Two of my children were looking for work of their own and the third was starting high school. Our bills are only climbing like everyone else’s. Unfortunately, I can’t impose ridiculous tariffs on people in my life to offset my lost salary.

So, yeah, I’m not experiencing funemployment. Most of us aren’t. We’re tired and worried and stuck in a loop of applications and ghosting and interviews that go nowhere.

I do have pastimes. I write and submit. I play in a band, and we rehearse once a week. I watch my son’s soccer matches (after paying his league fees on a credit card out of necessity). I’ve gotten pretty good at Fortnite via late evening sessions.

But all of it carries guilt. You should be looking for work, the voice in my head murmurs.

Grind culture is bad and its everywhere, but it’s survival in unemployment.

Submissions on top of applications

I mean, would I be a writer if I didn’t post a picture of one of my typewriters with this entry?

Part 11 in this series.

As if ending up on the job market hasn’t generated enough rejection, the timing of my job search has me navigating another period of being told no in my professional endeavors. Submission season.

The end of summer through early fall is when I typically send all of my unpublished creative work to journals and magazines for consideration. Most places I send submissions have a rejection rate north of 95 percent, which means…I already had a stack of nopes coming my way at the exact moment a flood of job rejections began arriving.

But it gets better! I also recently completed a draft of a novel manuscript I think is ready for serious consideration. So, in the middle of the summer, I sent it to several agents to see if I can find representation. This is also an endeavor that leads mostly to doors closing.

And, in the void space between jobs, I have also been cold calling potential clients for freelance work, something of an infrequent side project when I was employed full time that will now, hopefully, provide a bit of a life raft to float me. The kind of writing, editing, or coaching work I do could also provide me something other than not having a job to expend some of my mental energy on. In the short term, though, mostly it’s provided an extra dose of rejections, mostly of the silent variety.

In some ways, the fact that I’ve dealt with exponentially more rejections than acceptance in my publishing career should have inoculated me to what I am now experiencing.

I tell myself this a lot, anyway. I have the requisite writer’s gallows humor. I have a network of friends who also trudge through the submission wastelands in search of the one or two acceptances that will keep us going.

But if I’m honest, it kinda feels like piling on at this point. And, in many cases, I’m the one throwing things on the pile.  

I don’t really know what to do with this awareness other than acknowledge it even as I hope to someday look back and say this was the fire I had to walk through to get where I ended up.

Near misses (in new fields)

Blocked trails are the rule, not the exception.

Part 10 in this series.

On the heels of my near misses in higher ed, I found myself asked into a couple of interview processes outside the academic world in the early summer. As I prepared for both, I lectured myself on not getting too hopeful.

One was a three-interview sequence, the other four. Both were in sectors I’ve not worked in. But I’m a storyteller and professional sense-maker. I tend to do well in person, so I went into both feeling positive.

The first interview was for an editing job in the communications department of a utility company. I’d applied for a different position, but their recruiter reached out to encourage me to apply for the one would interview for.

And it went well. I was lined up for a second interview until an internal hiring review put the process on pause. When it started up again, I was not invited to continue. That sucked, but it felt like a good sign and if another position opened, I expected to be taken seriously.

To date, I’ve applied for three more with the company with no luck.

Around the same time, a large food wholesaler posted an internal comms position. I applied and completed a general first-round interview with HR and then a second rounder with the team lead who would supervise the position. Both went well and the lead said she’d be in touch in a week to let me know if I’d be moving on to in-persons.

And that was it. The company ghosted me.

In professional sports, athletes refer to their “welcome to the league” moments when the dream of being a pro collides with the reality of how hard it is to compete at that level.

I see these two experiences as my welcome to the market moment. Message received.  

Leaving people you actually like…

Like visiting a house no longer a home.

Part 9 in this series.

I came to the university I was just ejected from at their request. When the call came, I was teaching at another school. On the water in San Diego of all places.

But this was my alma mater.

And so I took the job, a chance to work in the place where professors had helped a lost 19-year-old me find direction. The decision felt (and still feels) right. But it also makes leaving much harder.

Many of my colleagues were once teachers and mentors of mine. I made friendships over my decade there; celebrated and grieved life’s milestones with many of those people.

Being cut off from all these friends has me thinking about what it is to leave behind people we actually like when a job ends. Call me sentimental, but this is one of the externalities of being laid off, an emotional cost paid by former employees their company will never see.

Sure, that’s life. Sure, the internet and coffee shops still exist for continuing those relationships. Sure, none are promised more than the season we get with people. As Frost put it, “way leads on to way.”

But we all know what happens at the end of school. We say we’ll keep in touch, believe our lives will remain interconnected. But that doesn’t always (or often) hold true, especially when leaving the daily rhythms of those relationships was not our choice.

And so, we need to grieve. But what does that look like in a professional context?

For me, it meant writing my closest peers a letter, by hand, letting them know what I was specifically grateful for when it comes to their place in my life. I left them on their desks late the night I finished packing up my office.

Did they make the pain of leaving less? Not really.

Am I seeing some of the early signs of the post-separation drift I described above? Yes.

The wash and tide of my new stage of life pulls at me every day. I just hope it doesn’t wash me ashore so far from my past I have to carry it for myself.

Zombie work

When finishing is wandering gray-scale days.

Part 8 in this series.

There’s something uniquely painful about running out the string as a full-time professor who knows they’re being pushed out the door at the end of the term months before that final push comes.

For clarity, I was informed I was losing my job at the beginning of February, meaning I had to teach through early May before doing the work of clearing out of my office and former life. (link to 2nd post here)

A caveat: I am aware there is a level of privilege in having a contract the school must honor for several months after laying a person off. No immediate stop. No last check slid across the table in the awkward minutes surrounding the news. A bit of a cushion in terms of time to look for a new job. 

These are all good things. And yet…

Being a professor—one who’s engaged and actually good at what they do—is more demanding than people think. I routinely worked 50-60 hours a week during the school year and that didn’t change my last term in the classroom.

What did change is how every day felt.

If you’re at all good at your job, people won’t understand why you were let go. And because they don’t understand, it makes talking to you awkward for them. They don’t want to cause you pain, nor think about the prospects of their own position being eliminated.

And then there are your students. I was committed to giving them the same quality instruction and attention I tried to bring to every class I designed and taught. The cognitive dissonance of that effort during my last term was exhausting.

Add to that the process of students finding out—typically one or two at a time—and then wanting to process their feelings about my dismissal with me. Rinse and repeat every few days for the three months I had left of the term.

Listen, I loved my students and my colleagues. More on that in my next post.

But the long pause before leaving was exhausting. I hope not to do that again.  

The State of (Your) Industry

This feels like an apt metaphor for the current state of higher education.

Continuing some thoughts from the last entry, it’s no secret higher education is in flux. People like to think it’s simply a product of changing technology and inflationary cost increases.

Of ideological and cultural realignment.

Of shifting market forces and expectations.

Of the adoption of a customer service model and the decades long effort to defund public education.

Of disconnection from fiscal realities and demographic cliffs.

Maybe it’s all these things. Maybe it’s none.

Maybe it’s the fact that higher ed was never supposed to be job training and simply trying to add being a certification device to its original design has led to its undoing.

Maybe it’s the standard process of moving career educators into administrative roles that require different skills set than they possess.

Maybe it’s the more recent trend of handing those administrative roles to private sector executives with zero understanding regarding the point of education.

Maybe it’s the willingness of people on all sides to make their takes on college education political punchlines and punches thrown.

Maybe the system really must move to embrace a 21st century ethos if it’s going to survive.

Maybe we are on the precipice of losing the very real benefits of humans being educated on how to be better humans by other humans.  

The state of the union in higher ed is more shadow than light.

More questions than answers.

More business than usual.

More worry than momentum.

More corporate than collective.

I don’t know the upshot of these musings. All I know is contained in the last line of the meeting informing me that my position was being eliminated.

“You simply don’t fit the direction the school is headed.”

I don’t know what that means, because I don’t know what that future looks like. And I don’t believe the people who made that pronouncement know either.

Signal to noise ratio: job searches in the age of AI

Here’s to still finding humor in the process, I guess?

Part 6 in this series.

This Is a bit of a part two to this entry.

Getting laid off is never a good thing. Sure, in some cases it can become one. But in any economy, abruptly losing a job puts the vast majority of people in a tough place.

But then there are times like the ones we find ourselves in. Terrible, in historic terms. Terrible, also, in pragmatic and present tense terms. Bleak even.

A snapshot from the day I’m writing this entry:

“The US unemployment rate rose to 4.3% in August of 2025 from 4.2% in the previous month, aligning with market expectations to reflect the highest proportion of joblessness since October of 2021. The number of unemployed increased by 148 thousand to 7.384 million in the period. In turn, the labor force increased by 436 to 170.778 million, driving the labor force participation rate to increase by 0.1 percentage point from the over two-year low in the previous month to 62.3%. The broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and those working part-time for economic reasons, rose to 8.1% from 7.9% in July.” From: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Big numbers, trending in the wrong direction. But what does this look like for job seekers on the ground level? Here’s one breakdown:

• You need approximately 42 applications to land one interview in 2025, with only 2.4% of candidates reaching the interview stage

• Only 3% of job applicants get called for interviews according to recent data, making the competition fiercer than ever

• Companies receive an average of 250 applications per job posting, but referrals increase your chances by 18x over cold applications.

Ok, sure, these are macro numbers spread across the entire market. How about the field I’ve been in for the past two decades and am most overtly qualified for? Yeah, about that…

“In the next few years, graduate students and postdocs will very likely face the worst job market in a generation….Faculty hiring will almost certainly be at a near standstill in the next academic year. In other economic downturns — such as the Great Recession of 2008 or the Covid pandemic — graduate students could extend time in their programs or move into postdoc positions. But this time, federal cuts have eliminated many postdoc positions and constricted funding for existing graduate students. A shrinking federal work force means fewer job opportunities in that sector for Ph.D.s. And uncertainty caused by tariffs and the trade war threatens to slow hiring in the private sector.”

(Un)fun Fact: I came out of graduate school in the last “worst job market in a generation!” But this time around, I’m a mid-career professional let go late in the cycle, a fact that makes my prospects of getting hired by another institution shakier. This is why the near misses I had just after being let go stung an extra amount.

And these last projections are about higher education in general. Drill down on the humanities, which have been intentionally misunderstood and attacked by outside forces and those who control university purse strings for decades.

Get a little more granular and my field within the humanities is perpetually denigrated as unnecessary (by people who live and die filling the voids in their lives with creative works, I might add).

I guess there’s not a lot of mystery in determining why I’ve had a perpetual upset stomach since that meeting with my dean in January.

Equally obvious is how important the encouragement of my friends and professional connections have been, even if only as floatation devices tossed into the water mid-storm.

So, what’s left to do? Drop more applications, of course. That 42 per interview target isn’t going to hit itself.