Columnist Jon Willing recently traded a high-profile reporting career for one in academia. The biggest winners? His family
A middle-age, late-career job change can be a gamble.
You have built years of seniority and achieved a level of expertise in a career you love, only to roll the dice on a professional switcheroo.
Since my last Dad’s Corner dispatch, I have changed careers from daily news reporting to teaching journalism at college.
Jon Willing, in the Algonquin Times newsroom, reads an edition of the college newspaper produced by his journalism students. Photo credit: S. Gunner
It’s still early, but I can tell you it’s been a wonderful transition that has re-energized my professional life and, I hope, made me more present as a family man.
The fall brought change for several aspects of our household. The new career opportunity came at the perfect time professionally and personally, with the political landscape at city hall, my old beat, changing dramatically and our son, Miles, heading off to junior kindergarten to begin his academic life.
It was a chance to reset my priorities, including how I was handling my responsibilities as a husband and father.
Before Nicole and I married, I was absorbed with my career, eager to find stories and meet other journalists. After we married, Nicole and I enjoyed the DINK lifestyle (dual income, no kids). In 2018, when I became a father, my priorities shifted completely.
Daily journalism is competitive, especially if you have a beat, like crime or city hall. Reporters want to be ahead of imminent news. It requires constant communication with sources and, on a beat like city hall, poring through pages of government reports. There’s always something to read or someone to chat up.
That work bleeds outside the “shift,” if there’s ever such a thing in journalism, and it’s common to be constantly plugged into work.
For me, trying to be the best husband and father I possibly can be, my work life was often interfering with my family life.
The hardest part was the increased frequency of weekend and night work, wiping out important family moments. I was missing more outings with Nicole and Miles and more parenting responsibilities were falling on Nicole’s shoulders during those exhausting toddler years. I felt like a suck complaining in my head about working more weekends and nights. After all, my mom worked all sorts of nights and weekends as a nurse, and here I was whining about my schedule (and I didn’t even have to work overnights!).
But I had an opportunity for a professional rebirth and a chance to reclaim family time. Based on those two factors, it was too good of an offer to pass up.
I have written in this space before about reconciling my job with my still new and much more important position as father. I suppose it will always be a work in progress. Is there ever a sweet spot between those priorities?
The truth is, there were several factors leading to my decision to change careers. Most of them were about doing something completely new, while deploying skills I’ve developed in creative new ways and embracing a new opportunity in a vocation I’ve always been interested in. But balancing my work and home lives was right up there among my top priorities. The prospect of spending more time with my family was an easy bet.