It starts as a niggle in the back of your mind, on the days when you feel like your job and your life are a bit ho-hum. You wonder what it would be like to make a change, listen to your heart instead of your head and follow your dream.
I can hear you scoffing. And you’re right – fantasy Hollywood musical it is not. Speaking from experience, you don’t wake up one day and decide to change careers. Like so many things in life, it’s something that creeps up on you month by month, or year by year. Maybe it will happen after a difficult time at your current job, a redundancy, a financial windfall, becoming a parent, or going through a break-up.
It’s the realisation that there is something else out there and it’s time you went after your dream, even if you fail. It’s the day you finally accept that if you don’t change something you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. It’s the day you stop and look around and think…
Is this all there is?
For newly minted lawyer Emma Moss, budding cabinet/furniture maker Mathilde Polmard, apprentice cabinet-maker Myla Gabagat, carpentry apprentice Marie Beringer, academic Ella Henry, and me – a former arts journalist turned arts lawyer – the decision to change career is one of the best we have ever made, as well as one of the hardest.
Forget online self-improvement courses promising a few short weeks to “change your life”. In the case of completing an apprenticeship, degree or PhD, it is years of commitment. Blood, sweat and tears doesn’t cover the half of it.
MAKING A MOVE
Successful HR consultant Emma Moss, 43, wanted to study law after high school – but her final marks weren’t high enough to get into law in Australia back then.
“So I did psychology but I always had this unfulfilled hope that one day I would do law.” In the end Emma’s husband threw down a challenge: “He said, ‘If you are going to do it, do it! And if not, stop moaning about it!’”
Dr Ella Henry (Ngātikahu ki Whangaroa, Ngāti Kuri, Te Rārawa), Associate Professor of International Business, Strategy and Entrepreneurship at AUT, found herself studying years after an ignominious end to her schooling at age 15, followed by lots of roaming, partying, and “living a hell of a life – but there was no grand plan to get a PhD”.
The now 67-year-old remembers her early days at Auckland University: “Back in 1986 the
