Career Re-Entry

Career re-entry isn’t something familiar to a lot of people. It seems most people land a job and stay within that field for a period of time, then move on to the next step in their profession, or an area similar to their speciality. I am not that person.

Having grown up in a area of minimal exposure to professions I became enamored with the first real idea of a career that was different from those I was surrounded by (the usual suspects for rural America). And God forbid I end up a housewife!

As life would have it, I ended up “staying at home”, which I put into parentheses because I could never just embrace “doing nothing”, as people like to refer to stay-at-home moms. Staying at home is busy AF! but for me it wasn’t filling the space of accomplishment. I found creative ways to continue to work managing social media for local business, writing for magazines, training for long ass races, taking college classes (when I already had 300+ credits), and working an opportunity that came my way that was remotely interesting. All this while parenting a child with a rare autoimmune disease, and when I say rare, I mean 1 to 3 out of 1 Million kids will be diagnosed with Juvenile Dermatomyositis. Oh, and I forgot to mention, all this time my husband was working in Kuwait and I was traveling back and forth about every 6 to 8 weeks. That alone makes a traditional career in the US complicated as we clearly don’t like to give more than a couple of weeks of vacation.

Fast-forward all these years and voila! I am finishing a Master of Science in Management and Leadership and ready to launch into that career…but in the meantime I’ve gone back to my roots of education. I personally love learning, the learning process and watching the light turn on!

These last few weeks I have steeped in to teach preK summer camp and it’s actually much more rewarding than I would have imagined. It’s not without it’s challenges, I did receive a bloody wad of snot on my leg the other day.

I am still hunting down that dream job, or at least the entry that will facilitate launching.

But meanwhile I am building some great skills and my confidence in those skills.

Here’s a glimpse into my day.