5 of 23 DOCUMENTSCrain's Chicago BusinessAugust 9, 2010

Career changes that fizzle out;Brave new world isn't always so great; so do we get a third act, too?

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CLAIRE BUSHEY

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1446 wordsProfessional dancers Marisol Sarabia and Ziba Lennox were convinced they needed to leave the ballet world and getreal jobs.Ms. Sarabia, 28, of Bucktown, was dancing with the San Francisco Ballet, and Ms. Lennox, 30, also of Bucktown, wasa principal with Ballet of the Americas in El Paso, Texas. But after watching colleagues flounder after career-endinginjuries, the sisters decided to trade the studio for cubicles.Ms. Sarabia earned an engineering degree and took a job at a civil engineering consultancy in Houston, and Ms. Lennox joined Best Buy Co. as a marketing manager for Hispanic initiatives.Unfortunately, real jobs weren't a good fit for the sisters. They returned to the dance world together, opening their ownstudio last October.Second-act careers don't always work out. Baby boomers hold an average of 10.8 jobs from age 18 to 42, according to a2008 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job changers looking for more money or satisfaction elsewhere caninstead find themselves frustrated by workaday annoyances they never imagined, leading them to change careers asecond time, or to boomerang back to their first line of work.Roxanne Hori, director of the career management center at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management,has seen this happen with the students and alumni she advises. She compares the phenomenon to trying on a new,must-have pair of shoes and buying them even though they pinch. The pinch can be ignored in the store, but not on thestreet.In Ms. Lennox's case, swapping pointe shoes for pumps meant trading the satisfaction of individual hard work for thefrustration of trying to shift a corporate bureaucracy as a lone employee. Ms. Sarabia was undone by the sedentarynature of engineering. One night, after working for 12 hours, she bent to pick it up a dropped pencil-and pulled amuscle. She thought: Really?Now, at their MaZi Dance Fitness Centre in Wicker Park, they teach classes in ballet, Pilates and aerobics.What keeps us working so hard is not wanting to go back, Ms. Lennox says.TOO BIG A CHANGE?Page 1

Career changers often are trying to get as far away as possible from the job that's making them miserable, says

Cheryl

Rich

Heisler

, founder of Lawternatives, a Chicago career counseling service for lawyers looking to leave theprofession. As with marriage, hasty jumps are often repented at leisure.Ms.

Heisler

, 51, graduated from law school and joined a private firm only to discover she hated the routine work andconstant deadlines. It looked like the business people were having all the fun, she says.She visited a Ben & Jerry's in New York and decided to open a franchise in Chicago. When Ben Cohen, a co-owner of the Vermont-based ice cream empire, called her to discuss the arrangement, she was on the phone with a partner in herfirm. She told the partner she'd get back to him. Her quick willingness to end that call confirmed her feeling that it wastime to leave law.The franchise idea ultimately fell through, but she landed an assistant brand manager position at Northfield-based KraftFoods Inc. She thought she'd be dreaming up new concepts to sell Kraft products. Instead, she found herself crunchingnumbers. She also missed helping clients and a service-oriented work environment. At her law firm, lawyers picked upthe phone on the first ring; they never wanted to keep a client waiting. At Kraft, where the caller was likely fromanother department, the phone just rang and rang. I never thought that would bother me.As she struggled at Kraft, she started informally advising friends and colleagues who also wanted to get out of law. In1988, she started Lawternatives.Even if you didn't love your first career, and even if you didn't love your second career, you should be getting closer,she says. I couldn't have done the job I do now without all the pieces that went into it.But beware of too many shifts, especially if you aren't being promoted in the process, warns William White, a professorof industrial engineering and management sciences at Northwestern University.You become tainted merchandise, he says. People are less likely to hire you if you change jobs all the time.TRYING A NEW THINGMark Pils, 49, of Cary, spent the first 12 years of his career in sales. He went back to school in 1993 to earn a computerscience degree because the job market for programmers was hot. He landed a job at Allstate Corp. straight out of school,then moved to HSBC Technology & Services in 2000.But Mr. Pils discovered that programming on the job was different than at school. At work, he filled out Dilbert-likelevels of paperwork related to his code. Less than two-thirds of his time was spent programming.The clincher came at HSBC when he wanted to rename File1 as File2. For this, he sat through eight hours of meetings.After his wife befriended a personal trainer, Mr. Pils decided to change careers again. In 2007, he opened his studio,Raising the Bar Inc., at his home in Cary. But the business didn't generate enough income, and he was recently hired asan regional account manager for Quill Corp., a Lincolnshire company that sells office supplies.I've come full circle, he says.Sometimes people realize they've miscalculated before they even land a new job. Barbara Limanowka, 35, of LincolnPark, had worked in finance for a decade when she decided to switch to organizational-change consulting. She grew upin Poland and adapted to a new culture in the United States, so she thought she could help others do the same in theworkplace.She enrolled in a two-year program at Northwestern. But while working on her thesis, it dawned on her that she didn'ttrust the information collected through interviews. Her research only felt solid after survey respondents provided herPage 2Career changes that fizzle out; Brave new world isn't always so great; so do we get a third act, too? Crain's ChicagoBusiness August 9, 2010

with quantitative data to analyze. She understood the world through numbers; it turned out finance was the right fieldfor her after all. Following graduation, Chicago-based Warranty Group Inc. hired her as an underwriter-a position shecould have gotten with her finance degree.I thought I really wanted to do this, and then, oh my gosh, how expensive can a dream be? Ms. Limanowka says.In some situations, circumstances send workers pingponging back and forth between two fields. Kelly Dimitrelis, 29, of Bloomingdale, grew up at her family's business, Rainbow Restaurant & Pancake House in Elmhurst. She worked therepart time while studying finance and marketing at DePaul University, then started full time after graduation.After five years there, a regular customer, insisting she should be in sales, offered to pull some strings to get her a job asa loan officer at Fidelity Mortgage Inc. in Des Plaines.I couldn't say no, Ms. Dimitrelis says. She had to figure out whether she wanted to go into the restaurant businessbecause she loved it or because it was the only career she knew. The sales job wasn't what I wanted to do, but I had totry it out so I didn't have that regret in my mind.At Fidelity, she found herself calling the restaurant on her lunch break to check up on things. After eight months, shecouldn't stay away any longer. She left Fidelity and now plans to open her own restaurant this fall in Algonquin.BACK AND FORTHLeslie Baldacci, 55, of Morgan Park, also found herself caught between two worlds. A reporter for the ChicagoSun-Times for 24 years, Ms. Baldacci left in 1999 to teach in Chicago Public Schools. She returned to the newspapersix years later because a teacher's pay wasn't enough to cover her own children's tuition payments. The newsroom hadchanged in her absence, the racket replaced by young reporters e-mailing each other rather than shouting. On the firstday of school, a friend found her crying in the bathroom.Ms. Baldacci decided to return to education, and a few months later was hired as a coach in the Chicago New TeacherCenter, an organization that trains teachers. She had planned to return to her own classroom this fall, but the district laidoff her and her fellow coaches in June. Now, Ms. Baldacci quotes Tom Petty: The future is wide open.Not everyone glides so easily between professions.Jeff Carroll, a Naperville-based career consultant, recalls a former client who switched from corporate human resourceto education, then wanted to return to the business world. Explaining her decampment to recruiters and employerswasn't easy.Some more homework before the transition, he says, might have helped her identify which working conditions shereally found important.But often careers aren't really managed or planned. They just happen, he says. People kind of wander.Copyright 2010 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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