First Person

The Mid-Career Job Search

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By Donald E. Hall

It is pretty easy to give career advice in a top-down manner: Seasoned professors offer it to graduate students going on the market for the first time, successful administrators to aspiring deans or vice presidents, and newly hired tenure-track faculty members to underemployed adjuncts.

It's a lot harder to formulate rules, or even offer helpful tips, for people similarly positioned at the midpoint of their careers -- to other administrators still unsure of their choice to take the administrative track or to fellow professors wanting to make a change.

That's partly because every midcareer move is different. When you're searching for your first tenure-track job, you know that while the location might vary, the gist of the job will remain the same. You'll be starting at the beginning. That's not the case with a midcareer move.

It's also because when you give career advice to peers instead of potential initiates, you risk sounding self-congratulatory and obnoxious.

I'm going to take that risk here and talk a bit about my own recent experiences on the job market. I do so because I wish I had had some kind of example or case study (even if inevitably atypical) to mull over when I started thinking about my own possible career trajectories a few years ago.

So here is my little midcareer success story: At age 43, and after 13 years at California State University at Northridge (my only place of employment since earning my Ph.D.), I have just accepted an endowed research professorship at West Virginia University.

The logistics of the midcareer job search are the easiest aspect of the experience to discuss because they didn't differ significantly from my earlier searches. Anyone going on the market at midcareer will soon discover that it involves roughly the same types of applications and reference letters, screening interviews, and extended on-campus visits that characterized your first job search.

Just as in the early 1990s when I sought my current job, my search this year resulted from a careful scanning of job ads and a thoughtful prescreening of locations where I would even consider moving. Then I sent out my letters and waited patiently for phone calls or e-mail messages.

Beyond the basics of the search, the long process leading up to my midcareer move was dramatically different from that which culminated in my search as a newly minted Ph.D. I knew from my graduate days that I wanted my career to evolve significantly over time; I am a person who needs occasional but significant change in order to feel challenged and fully engaged.

But for me, a midcareer move did not necessarily mean changing institutions. That's why, as an assistant professor before I earned tenure, I decided to begin work in administration, serving first as a program director and then as a department chairman.

I also decided as an assistant professor to commit myself to a very disciplined, methodical research agenda. Over the years, that decision brought me some very positive rewards locally -- early promotion to tenure and other forms of recognition -- and eventually made me an attractive candidate nationally.

For several years I was able both to do administrative work and to publish aggressively. While I was happy at Cal State Northridge, I would occasionally feel a desire for new challenges and big changes. I would glance at job listings, but nothing seemed a good fit -- until recently, when I spotted the opportunity at West Virginia. I knew I had reached a fork in the road. However much I might have liked to think I could keep all of my options open all of the time, that degree of flexibility was impossible to maintain forever.

Around the same time that I learned that I was a finalist for the West Virginia professorship, I was also approached by two search committees asking me to apply for deanships at two very different types of institutions.

Suddenly it was time to ask myself some very tough questions. Was it an acceptable prospect for me to leave classroom teaching forever? Did it make me uncomfortable to think of serving a different student clientele, one that was, perhaps, less diverse and more privileged than what I had become used to at Northridge?

Since I had already decided that I would only move with tenure, any risk that I was running in changing jobs seemed modest compared to job hunting without tenure, but there is still a risk. After all, in dramatically altering my job and daily life, I was not only jeopardizing my own happiness but also that of my domestic partner.

However desirable the idea of changing jobs, staying was always an attractive option, too, since I had invested fully in my institution and my colleagues. I have long argued that it is a terrible error to approach any institutional affiliation with the intent of using it as a steppingstone.

Your current job may be your only job, or your last job, whether you plan for it to be so or not. And if you are happy with that job and with the profession generally -- as I certainly have been -- then you have the luxury of evaluating much more deeply whether a given move will increase or decrease your overall sense of personal and professional fulfillment.

In fact, the biggest difference I noticed between this search and my earlier ones was that I could move through the hiring process without the terrible feeling of desperation that I felt when first trying to establish a career.

I was confident that I could make a solid case for my candidacy at West Virginia, and the "fit" there seemed right. But I already had a job that I loved. I was relaxed and able to contemplate without anxiety the possibility of an offer or of a rejection.

The offer came and I have accepted it. Incidentally, I have also accepted the fact that in making that choice I may have given up forever the possibility of becoming a dean. Yet certainly a variety of new and interesting challenges await me.

As someone leaving a department chairmanship for an endowed professorship, I will have to discover and help define what that position means, both for me and for my new home institution. In fact, I have to learn to become a department member again rather than the primary decision maker and departmental spokesman.

I will have to establish new ties of trust and support. At Northridge everyone knows me, knows my work, my quirks, and my degree of responsibility. I'm leaving all of that behind. I now have to build new relationships and new histories of consistency and good will.

At age 43 I am, in effect, starting over, though certainly not from the vulnerable position of the untenured. But I am giving up a comfortable daily routine, an enviable collegial and administrative support network, and a much loved institutional home.

As with all aspects of my career, I have to take responsibility for the wisdom and consequences of my choice, even if I also have to acknowledge and remember that I was also very lucky. The right job opened up at the right time; the previous holder of the West Virginia position happened to make a midcareer move at a time when I could also contemplate a move.

All I did was prepare myself as best I could for any appropriate opportunities that happened to arise. To claim anything more would be arrogance. However, to admit to anything less would be dishonest and unhelpful to others thinking of their own careers.