Avoiding ruin

Building slack through career exploration

It was May, 2014. There I was, sitting in my office, minding my own business, at the Army Medical Department Center and School in San Antonio where I had been teaching since July of 2010, still on active duty in the Army. My boss walked into my office with a letter in his hand. The conversation went something like this:

Boss: “Hey, I just got this recruitment letter from the University of New Hampshire. Their Department of Health Management and Policy is hiring - you’re from up there - you should apply.”

Me: “What? They wouldn’t want me. I’m not going to waste my time. Plus I just made a deal with the assignments manager to go back to D.C.”

Boss: “Well, take it home and think about it. You’ll be wasting your time in D.C. You’re meant to be a teacher.”

So I took it home and put it on my make-shift desk (folding table) that was my “home office” in my wife’s and my bedroom. It was a very COVID-like arrangement, but very pre-COVID. A few days later I was sitting there, typing away on my laptop, again minding my own business, when the wife came up to talk to me about something. The conversation went something like this:

Wife: “[Something, something, something, actual words lost to time] - wait what is this? Why do you have a letter from UNH?”

Me: “Oh, it’s a recruitment letter from their Department of Health Management and Policy. Apparently they are hiring.”

Wife: “Well, are you going to apply?”

Me: “No - I already have a deal with the assignments manager to go back to D.C. - you know that. Plus they wouldn’t want me.”

Wife: “ “ (nonplussed, fists on hips)

Me: “What?”

Wife: “You should at least apply.”

Me: “Waste of time.”

Wife: “I’ve been following you around for 23 years - I want to go home. You will apply and if you don’t get it, then we can go to DC.”

Me: “Okay.”

July, 2014. Conversation with the Chair of HMP and me:

Chair: “Mark, we’d like to make you an offer.”

Me: “ “ (shocked silence)

Chair: “Mark?”

Me: “Okay…”

True(ish) story. My wife swears that’s not what she said. I remember differently. Maybe I heard it, even if she didn’t actually say it. Regardless, that’s roughly how I wound up here at UNH in January of 2015. Tenure came, painfully like delivering a 10lb baby without an epidural, in 2021. And now my plan is to exit my office on a gurney at some point, hopefully far down the road. It’s why I call our house The Last Homely House (LHH for short) for those of you who are new to the newsletter. 

One of the first research projects I started when I arrived at UNH was interviewing other retired Army Medical Service Corps (MSC) officers about their experience retiring and transitioning to the next phase of their professional careers. One of the common things that I discovered was that my story, in its substance, if not its form, was the common story for most retiring MSC officers from all three services. By which I mean, the vast majority of MSC officers did not plan to retire when they did. They almost all expected to have one more tour, and the plan was always that they would start their job search during that next tour, much like I was planning to do, prior to July of 2014. Usually something happened during the tour they did retire from that caused them to put in their application for retirement (yes, civilians, you have to apply to retire - one doesn’t just quit the military). The most common something was that the service member’s spouse had had it with the military. The spouse was tired of moving, tired of helping the kids change schools, etc. The second most common thing was the service member realized that they had reached the end of their ride. A few of my participants had been passed over for promotion to the next rank. I had a couple of colonels who had been hanging on for general and realized it wasn’t going to come, I had a few lieutenant colonels who had been passed over for promotion to colonel and decided they didn’t want to hang on. That sort of thing. And then there were the participants who realized they were just tired of the military themselves - maybe one too many bad bosses, one too many moves where they had to go somewhere they didn’t want to go because of the “needs of the [Army/Navy/Air Force]”. Whatever the reason, they jumped and pulled their chutes sooner than they thought they would. 

One of the things I learned from this experience was that military service members - especially service members who pursue a career in the military - stink at what careers researchers call career exploration. (Stink is a technical term that means they are several standard deviations below the mean in their efforts.) According to Ziang, et al., (2019), career exploration can be defined as a process that 

[F]acilitates the establishment of coherent career plans, the pursuit of a personally meaningful work life, the management of rapid changes, and assists individuals to deal with diverse transitions in life.

Ziang, et al. go on to say that successful people reflect and explore in order to ensure better career outcomes:

To move forward in their career journeys, individuals engage in career exploration by reflecting upon both personal (i.e., internal) and contextual (i.e., external) factors. The extent to which this exploration is effectively processed drives individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and other career- and work-related outcomes.

To be fair to my fellow retirees, I think we (I will include myself in this statement) did a good job as a group of military career exploration, but we often treat civilian life as this other thing, out there. Like, “when I get to Mars, then I will think about what I will do.” But Mars is so far away, why think about it? And who knows, maybe I will never go to Mars? Except everyone eventually leaves the military, one way or another, and we all know it. And yet, in my observation, military service members, as a group, do not give adequate thought, adequate exploration, to the next phase of their lives. 

Military service members tend to be very myopic in their exploration. I don’t think that is unique to military service members, based on my review of the careers literature, and based on my anecdotal experience talking to friends and family members. I had a friend reach out last week to tell me he had been caught in a round of lay-offs from his hospital. He’s a good guy with a lot to contribute, but his organization, like a lot of hospitals, is struggling in a post-COVID economy. He’ll be ok because I know he is engaged in professional organizations and continues with his career exploration. It might take him a while to make the next transition, but people always need talent. 

History also provides plenty of examples of industry-wide change that results in massive realignments (AKA, layoffs, downsizing, off-shoring, etc.). In 1945, the developed world finally stopped blowing itself apart. When the dust settled, only the United States of the developed countries still had its whole industrial productive capacity intact. European and Japanese factories had been blown to rubble. For the next 25 years, American manufacturers basically had the world market to themselves as the rest of the world picked up the pieces of their obliterated economies and started to rebuild. American businesses didn’t really have to compete, nor did they really have to worry about quality. Businesses made money hand-over-fist, and unions were able to grab a piece of that opulence for workers. Everyone got fat, dumb, and happy. And then the rest of the world started catching up. Made in Japan went from meaning, “cheap junk” to “technological wizardry” (sound familiar? China is coming.) American companies couldn’t compete with foreign companies because for too long we had not paid attention to quality and cost. We had to re-import the quality revolution that had gone overseas when American businesses were not interested. But in that process, our industrial base evaporated, leaving behind masses of people who had become used to high wages for low-skill union work. 

When I was a kid in the early 80’s, we lived in a town called Prospect, Maine (population 504), across the Penobscot River from the bigger town called Bucksport where there was a paper mill. My father was paying back a Public Health Service scholarship he had received to go to medical school by working in a rural health clinic. There was only one family within walking distance of our house with a kid my age. The father of the family worked at the mill and did very well for himself. No formal education past high school, he had grown up in the area and went to work in the mill as soon as he graduated. My friend would sometimes tease me for being “rich” because my father was a doctor, but my father told me that he knew my friend’s father made the same as he did. Working at the mill was a good gig. My friend planned to follow in his father’s footsteps - why go to college? “You can start at $6/hr [about $22/hr today] sweeping the floor.” I don’t know what happened to my friend - we didn’t have social media back then. What I do know is that in 2014 the mill closed for good. Five hundred people lost their jobs. The mill was the economic heart of that community. They are still trying to transition to a post-mill economy. Here’s something I know: in the post-mill economy, people won’t make $22/hour to sweep floors. And that probably hadn’t been true for a while. 

I’ve always paid attention to mill closings in New England because that was the industrial heart of our rural communities. Bucksport wasn’t unique. Most of the mills in rural New England, which had provided solid, middle class lifestyles to rural people have folded. Other parts of the country saw closures of manufacturing as well, of course. In terms of deindustrialization, 2014 was pretty late, all things considered. These closures were devastating to their communities because, as Bruce Springsteen sang, 

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores

Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more

They're closing down the rug mill across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back

The good news for the retiring MSC officers I interviewed, all of them found employment after they retired. They had great track records even if the civilian world didn’t necessarily understand all the words - like deputy commander for administration or area support battalion commander. All of them had graduated degrees - some more than one. Many of them bounced through several jobs in the first few years of their post-military career, but they were employed in good jobs, most making more than they did when they were on active duty. During the transition, they knew they would have the financial slack provided by a military pension. It’s not huge, but it’s not nothing. The transition was harder than it needed to be for many of them, but as far as I know, they were all doing well. That story is not true for places like Bucksport. We can put a veneer on it - Bucksport is trying to become a cute New England town that is attractive to big city people with lots of money looking for vacation spots. It has the advantage of having a beautiful river that the mill had polluted and generally marred for decades. But now that the mill is gone, the waterfront is looking better (the wife and I visited just before COVID). There are a lot of towns that have lost their factories that don’t have the ability to reimagine themselves into tourist traps. Maine had the 8th highest rate of death from drug overdose in the country in 2021 (47.1/100,000) - almost twice the death rate in more populated California or New York. Most of the other “winners” coming in higher were states that had faced worse deindustrialization (e.g., Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia).

The world constantly changes. Industries emerge, become powerful, and then die. Jobs that once were valued are wiped out by technological change. What was a good career in the past is often not an option in the future. With advances in AI, I believe we will see changes in work akin to what we saw with the diffusion of the steam engine in the mid-1700’s (that was the start of the Industrial Revolution). Even when the world stands still (which it doesn’t, but let’s pretend), we as human beings change. What was good for us as young people is not what is good for us later in our lives. Youth passes. Cognitive decline usually comes later than physical decline, but decline comes, regardless. Even Tom Brady eventually has to hang up the cleats. We can’t stick our heads in the sand like my military colleagues (and I did) and deny the future is coming.

Career exploration is a way of building in slack into our professional lives. (I talked about slack two weeks ago.) Active career exploration creates awareness of the opportunities out there for us. We might get caught by an unexpected layoff, or find ourselves faced with a terrible boss, or maybe something changes in our personal lives and we need to do something else. Whatever it is, having actionable intelligence about what we can potentially transition to, having a network that feeds us information about opportunity, that is an inoculation from sudden and unexpected change. As we learned with the COVID vaccine - it won’t keep you from getting sick, but it will keep you from getting really sick. 

Slack keeps us from ruin. As I talked about before, there are all kinds of ways that we can build slack into our lives. Most of us have one primary source of income - whatever job we happen to be working. That’s a huge asset. If we lose it, it can be devastating. We have to protect ourselves from ruin. One way to do that is to engage in a constant effort at career exploration. We can constantly be looking for what could be next. Like I said, my plan is to stay in my current role until the end of time. I plan to be the one shutting off the lights when the sun burns out and the universe goes dark. But I also monitor other opportunities. Just in case. Because who knows? I am involved in several professional organizations, my podcast introduces me to influential people that I can add to my network, and I always go out of my way to help people find opportunities. So I’m always engaged in career exploration, and its corollary, job searching. Van Hoye, van Hooft, & Lievens (2009) (great names, right?) break the job search process into two stages: 

Preparatory job search involves gathering information about potential job leads through various sources. Subsequently, active job search consists of contacting and applying to prospective employers. 

I see preparatory job search as a part of career exploration. With career exploration, you are thinking about what you might do, what your next move might be, where you want to go. With preparatory job search, you are gathering information about how you might implement a job search if you need to. You’re building your network, you’re finding out whether you would be a good fit for a new role or new organization. You’re keeping your ear to the ground so that if the need arises, you can pull your chute and be gone. That’s what I do as a protective measure. All the time. And it’s what everyone should be doing because you may be a great employee, but your organization might fail, and you might be out of a job through no fault of your own.

One of the reasons I love my work is I help people start to explore possibilities. What else might they become? I especially love working with students whom I know haven’t been given all the opportunities. My little friend from all those years ago was engaging in what the literature calls foreclosure of identity - which means he was taking as granted that his future would be like his father’s. He wasn’t going to explore other possible identities. He was going to be a mill man like his father. It was a good plan. Except that the world had other ideas. Nevertheless, there is so much opportunity if you know how to look, which most people in circumstances like that do not. Places like UNH are a few rungs up the career exploration ladder from a small, former mill town, but that is why state schools exist. I’ve started trying to reach out to high schools in former mill towns in New Hampshire. It’s harder to get teachers and guidance counselors to talk to you than you might think. Careers accessed through college are not the only way forward, of course. There are so many opportunities in the trades that are not getting filled. I’ve talked with plumbing, HVAC, and appliance repair companies in the last year just in the process of having work done on my house and they all say they can’t find anyone to train. Hospitals and nursing homes are clamoring to train people for entry level nursing roles. And yet people are dying of despair because they don’t know how to find the opportunities.

Society has a role in helping people do a better job at career exploration. By society I don’t just mean government agencies. Non-profits, churches, and families, along with schools, universities, and government agencies all need to do a better job of career exploration and preparatory search by helping people become more aware of opportunity. Russ Roberts of EconTalk, who I often share, has said many times, sometimes all someone needs is a suitcase and a bus ticket. I agree with the sentiment, but if you are poor, making a move to another city or state can lead to ruin in its own way given the financial fragility of many people. Hence the need for institutional support.

At the end of the day, regardless of institutional support, the person best able to ensure you avoid ruin is you. Actively exploring opportunities, even if you love your job, provides a layer of protection if some exogenous shock happens, and you suddenly need another opportunity. The best protection from being exploited by a job/boss/company is having a good alternative. (And having six months of expenses saved - but that’s another source of slack.) My study of military retirees shows that even smart, high-achieving, over-educated individuals can find themselves challenged if they are not engaged in creating this sort of career slack. The reality of so many drug-related deaths in states where high rates of deindustrialization has taken place is an indicator that great suffering comes about as a result of a lack of knowing how to look for other opportunities. Investing in exploration, even a little, is a defensive measure with relatively low cost and high potential value. We shouldn’t rely on luck.