At our 30th reunion in 2007, I found myself between jobs. My employer of 24 years decided to offer an early retirement package. I was 47 and eligible to apply because I had been there so long. To be clear, an early retirement incentive isn't like getting a pension for life making it unnecessary to work from then on; it's the rolling of one's retirement contributions into an IRA along with an extra incentive for parting ways with the company early.
When a company starts offering incentives to leave, it may be a harbinger of things to come. Pushing experienced people out the door to save money is often an act of desperation.
I had been working in the high tech manufacturing field my entire career and it was clear that it was rapidly moving to China. The manufacturing jobs had already moved there. The company, which at one time had 8000 employees in northern Colorado had dwindled down to a small fraction of that number and the work I was doing involved a lot of travel to places like Taiwan and China. I felt like I was helping to transition the remaining jobs to China. At some point one of those jobs would be mine. I wanted to leave on favorable terms while I could.
For a few years after I left HP I did consulting work, mostly related to designing new products for start-up businesses. Although it was interesting work, it was also not very stable because it depended on investors who were willing to fund new and unproven ideas and markets. Sometimes the money would run out, and if you accepted stock or some other form of deferred compensation, you were out of luck. You learn pretty quickly it's not a good idea in startup situations to accept deferred compensation. For every story you hear about someone getting rich when a company goes public, there are many more situations where people lose all the time and money they invested in a start-up.
At the time I was doing consulting, I found that I needed to update some of my programming skills because the Internet had changed everything related to programming in a very short time, so I enrolled in some classes at Aims community college which is conveniently located about a mile from where I live. While taking these classes, the professor noticed that I was helping other students debug their programs since many of them were new to programming. He began to recruit me to be a tutor for his classes. I found that if you really want to learn a skill, you should try teaching it to someone else. You'll be amazed at how much better you understand it in the end. So I agreed.
I spent an afternoon each week helping students with their programming assignments while still engaged in my consulting gigs. As I became friends with the other teachers in the Computer Information Systems department, they would often tell me that their teaching job at the college was the best job they ever had, and all of them had spent time in industry prior to becoming teachers. The college offered me a class to teach as a part-time instructor. I found that I enjoyed interacting with students, and the technology was always changing so I was learning continuously and I liked that aspect of it.
Most of the CIS instructors were about 10 years older than me and they started retiring one after the other. When a position came up three years ago, I applied for it and began teaching full time. I teach subjects related to web programming, operating systems, and PC applications. It's been a great opportunity and I feel very fortunate to be there. The campus is beautiful, the other instructors are fun to work with, and every year I get to meet a new group of students.
When I was a grad student at Penn State, I had been a teaching assistant and taught lab classes in subjects like welding, machining, and computer programming, and I found the environment fun and stimulating. I didn't want to leave. Several of my colleagues never did leave academia. They went on to earn PhDs and began teaching at universities around the country. But I wanted to get some practical experience in the field of engineering so I ended up taking a job with HP in Colorado. The idea of teaching would come up from time to time, but to teach at a university, you need a PhD. And that takes a lot of time and effort. And there's a risk to it. To earn tenure at a university, that is, to keep your job, you need to be constantly publishing research papers and getting grant money. Your ability to teach is hardly taken into consideration. And it can take up to 7 years before you know if you have tenure or if you have to leave and look elsewhere for employment.
However, community colleges are different. They will hire instructors with Masters degrees, and they truly value industry experience. To get tenure, all you have to do is teach.
For the first three years of full time employment, I have been on probation. I could be let go at any time for any reason while on probation. But if I proved that I could teach, and I didn't screw up, I would be taken off of probation and given tenure. Tenure doesn't mean you have a job for life regardless of what you do, but if the college wants to fire a tenured professor it has to be for a good reason and must be done using due process.
So, as of this month, I am no longer on probation. And it feels good because the word 'probation' has such negative connotations.
Were you expecting a story of some criminal activity that earned me my 3-year stint of probation? I am sorry if you think I tricked you with the title of the article. But would you have read the article had I not used the word probation?
This article is way of letting anyone who reads it to know what I've been doing since our last reunion. I've left out a lot of details, of course, and if you're curious, I can fill you in at the reunion.
But since I've gotten my story out of the way, how about it if we talk about you instead?
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