Too many second-careerists are doing it all wrong, and it's been seriously bumming me out (some language that both your generation and mine (Gen X) can appreciate). The colleges have fed you a bit of a lie - and I'm not sure why they did it, because the truth would earn them the same or more tuition dollars from you. The lie? That you, a 55-70 year old, can substantively compete in an outdoor, seasonal, off-road career field with an army of career-hungry 22-year olds. I'm not talking about hiring (that would be age discrimination). I'm talking about the actual job. For instance, are you ready to:
1) Knowingly expose yourself, repeatedly, to Lyme Disease, day after day, and be in situations where there's no more bug spray and plenty more ticks?......you just have to go get in the woods and work. You are going to get tick bites. You'll probably need to get antibiotics for Lyme. Maybe even annually.
2) Work outdoors through cuts that require stitches, multiple bee stings, and snow/rain/ice downpours? My edict for more than a decade was that my field crews worked in all conditions except lightning and icy roads. Yes, some people did cry, in fact. Several of them. It was hard. It was work. It had to get done. If our crew was 3 hours from home, and we'd already worked an 8 hour field day (plus a 2 hour drive that morning), and we had 4 more hours of work to do, NO we are not coming back tomorrow. We are finishing it tonight. Call your husbands and wives. Enjoy the OT pay. But don't complain.
3) Work outdoors for multiple 12+ hour field days in a row, just to return to a crummy hotel in a crummy town full of crummy restaurants? And by multiple days, I mean "two years."
4) Work in snake and alligator infested areas without proper protection in the interest of "getting the job done?"
5) Swim across a hot, stagnant ditch because to walk around it would take another hour? And then keep working outside in wet clothes that you know are filled with all awful manner of nasty bacteria and fungi?
Those are not atypical work conditions for entry-level employees in the environmental field. And while I've certainly phrased it as, "Are you cut out for this?", I think the more proper question is, "Isn't there a better use of your talents within the environmental field?" I've met far too many second careerists in the environmental field who feel an incredible sense of "vertical integrity" - folks who think they are obligated to start at the bottom of the field and put in their work, like the young people. To them, I say, "I respect that, but you are out of your freaking mind."
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| Field work for your college class. Aww - friends and dry shoes! High five! |
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| Field work in real life: Long, lonely days in tough field conditions. |
The environmental field is built upon the backs of young people who can work for cheap and who want to prove that they love the environment and/or their job more than their peers do. That no challenge is too great. No working conditions unacceptable. That any gargantuan task can be completed in any infantesimile (sp?) increment of time. Not enough daylight? We'll work under headlamps. There's ice? I got crampons. And of course, I can fly out on Saturday to get an "early start." I did it. Many of us did.
It's fun, rewarding, challenging, and occasionally pretty miserable. The highs are pretty nifty but the lows are not to be trifled with, alone in your hotel room, sunburned and frostbitten in the same day, both pairs of boots are sopping wet, still hungry because Applebee's sucks, and the hotel bar is full of drunk townies and a single tap of Busch Light...........with your spouse calling and asking why you didn't tell you boss "No." And at that moment, your Local on the 8s pops up on your hotel TV, showing tomorrow's high temperature: 23 degrees, winds 25mph, wind chill of 10 degrees. Or, 109 degrees, and 90% humidity. Ah, the open road.
The best part about those entry level ecologists is that their time is billed at a very low rate, they don't take much vacation, they rarely ask for raises, and they never take sick days, except to play hookey or nurse a hangover. An ecologist with 2 years experience can do about 40% of what an ecologist with 10 years experience can do, and probably bills out at 75% less per hour. Entry level ecologists don't sit around and theorize and make lofty decisions. Entry level ecologists are the sharp end of the pencil. And nobody cares if the point breaks. You just grab a new pencil, or ram the old one into that overpowered sharpener....
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| Environmental science lab at college - learnin' science, chillin' with friends! Who said happy hour?! |
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| Real life lab ecologists. Boss over your shoulder 10 hours per day. |
Competing against that machine, in my opinion, is useless and a waste of your time. Instead, I recommend that you try to jump immediately into lower/mid management. This is helped, of course, if you worked in management in your prior career - even if it had nothing to do with the environment.
Take business classes. Make notes of exactly how many staff you trained and supervised over the course of your first career. Take a night and write down what you learned about people (as a whole) from supervising them. Witty anecdotes. Real lessons. Ask yourself: Do I possess the strength and the empathy to be a leader in the environmental field?
There are many people in very high positions in government environmental agencies and enviro-corporate America that have little to no environmental technical/college background. I'd say that 25% of the "industry's" leadership has little technical training in the field. Press secretaries who became deputy directors. Marketing folks who became department heads. And lawyers, oh the lawyers. And here's the good part - as someone who's finished your environmental college degree - you've got one up on them. It's fabulous. The hard part is to just physically get in the room when the right people are there to meet you and learn about you - and hopefully remember you for that next big vacancy. Given your high motivation level to date, I think you can break through the barriers that keep you from that.
In short, don't burn yourself out trying to be an entry-level soldier in the environmental field. Hopefully, you've learned something about work-life balance by this point in your life, and you'll see that taking your career in that direction would be a serious misstep. Think about what angles you can play to move more effectively into low or mid-level management - or higher - and let your second career develop from that point.
Good luck!
