When Career Plans Change…again…

Published May 30th, 2009

Last summer, many of you responded to my post When Career Plans Change. Well, in a nutshell, I had a very difficult decision to make, whether to put my long-term career and personal life plans on hold to take a great one-year maternity leave opportunity in industry, or to wait for my dream job in the public service while staying self-employed. Well, in the end, I had decided to take the mat leave and see where it leads me, knowing that nothing would likely happen any time soon with the public service I’d applied for (two-and-a-half years ago now!) given the tight fiscal constraints they are facing.

Fast-forward 10 months. Well, the public service did call about 4 weeks ago, and offered my a great position in our nation’s capital, about 5 hours away from where we live now. It was completely unexpected, it had been so long since I’d heard anything from them. Since then, I’ve quit my industry job, put my house up for sale, and started the new job a few days ago. It was a mad rush to get the house ready for sale before I started the new job. My old job old job involved an hour-and-a-half commute each way, every day, so I was burning the candle at both ends to get everything done in time.

Until our house is sold, I’ll be staying with family during the week, and going home on weekends. Thankfully, there is flexibility with my hours of work, and my husband is a teacher, so after the end of June he’ll have a lot more free time. This has meant a big change for him as well, he will have to give up the relationships and seniority he has with his current school board, and go back to being a supply teacher with the new school board, basically going back to square-one to look for a permanent classroom position. Thankfully, the new supply position won’t be a pay cut for him, and he can still contribute to the pension plan, since we’ll still be in the same province.

Change can be scary, but I think in the long term, it can be a very good thing. Sometimes, when we least expect it, one phone call can change everything, and, good or bad, we need to go with whatever that phone call brings. I’m adapting to a new group of people, new work environment, new responsibilities, and to the reality that we are finally getting what we started working towards about 6 years ago, when my husband went back to school. We now both have jobs where we’ll have good work schedules, pensions, and we can finally settle down somewhere and really start living our lives. It’s funny, we’ve wanted this for such a long time, but when it happened, it all happened at once, and we were really overwhelmed! Things are better now, and we need to focus this summer on my husband networking in our new city to try to hopefully get into a permanent classroom over the next year, which he really deserves. I’ll write more about the personal finance implications of this move once I see how the house sale plays out in a few weeks–I’m learning some very interesting things in my conversations with my personal banker!

Is anyone else going through something similar?

Share this via social bookmarking or email to a friend!