Preparing for a Second Career

During his 36-year career in the Denver television news business, Ernie Bjorkman saw the business change and grow through several technological shifts. Last year, with the merger of his station with another local news outlet, he saw his job disappear. Bjorkman advises other baby boomers, “Don’t be comfortable after 45.” Companies in all industries seem more eager than ever to trade in older employees for younger, cheaper workers.

Now 57, Bjorkman had planned ahead because he knew that the job wouldn’t last forever. He had always loved animals, but wasn’t interested in signing up for eight years of veterinary school. Instead, he enrolled in a two-year vet tech program at the Community College of Denver. By the time he was laid off of his news anchor job, he was finishing the training for his second career.

His annual salary will drop from $250,000 to about $30,000. "We'll start living the simple life again,” he says. He and his wife Susan will sell both their Denver condo and mountain home and plan to buy a small ranch in the San Luis Valley where he will open an emergency animal clinic.

Bjorkman feels blessed that he had the opportunity to meet the pope and presidents and ride in Air Force One. But he’s looking forward to the future. “You’ve got to have a plan.” You can watch his story as it was reported last week on ABC News 20/20.

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The Learning Business

Jonathan Fields was “the kid with the lemonade stand in 6th-grade, the landscaping business in high-school and the mobile-DJ business in college.”

He went on to be a securities and hedge-fund lawyer before ditching the law to open a yoga studio. That led him to learn about copywriting to promote the business. Did he go back to school to study writing? Nope. He went online and searched for information on copywriting. He found the websites and blogs of several top copywriters, red everything he could find and took notes. He found samples of their work and analyzed it.

Next, he bought and read all the books that his virtual mentors mentioned. Finally, he felt the need for more concentrated and personal information and attended a three-day seminar. “I am not someone who likes to surrender to the notion that I need help,” He explained in his book, Career Renegade. “I’ve always pretty much mastered whatever I needed to master on my own. This experience, though, opened my eyes both to the importance of finding a mentor, seeking out live attention, and copping to the fact that I don’t know everything.”

This leads me to two of my favorite quotes about learning:

I’m not sure who said “All learning is self-taught,” but I agree with the sentiment. On the other hand, I also agree with Harvey Mackay that "If everything a (person) learns over a thirty-year career is self-taught, you can bet some of it is dead wrong." Maybe the best learning comes from maintaining the tension between those two points of view.

That said, I have just finished reading Career Renegade, the best, most information-packed book on work that I’ve read in many years. I plan to use it as a workbook to grow my own renegade career.

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A Bachelor’s Degree: America’s Most Overrated Product?

Is college really worth it? That’s the question the John Stossel ABC News 20/20 asked in a provocative story last Friday. With the cost of college rising faster than inflation, Stossel wonders if a bachelor’s degree is the big lie.

The piece featured several students whose degrees saddled them with student loan debts of up to $125,000 and who ended up in entry-level jobs they could have gotten right out of high school. They understandably think "College was a rip-off.”

"You're led down this path of needing to go to college," he continued. "The college diploma is the new high school diploma."

Personal finance guru Suze Orman, who holds a BA in social work from the University of Illinois, says college is not for everyone. Those who are not the best students may be better off earning marketable skills at a community college or technical school.

Dr. Marty Nemko, an education consultant and career counselor, explains that the students who do well in college are already more likely to be successful than those who don't.

I have mixed feelings about this. I agree that college is not for everybody, but I am very glad I have a degree. On the other hand, it took me 12 years to earn my degree, partly because I refused to go into debt for it. Most of my students at the University of Phoenix are pursuing their degrees because they know or believe that they cannot go further in their careers without a degree. The lucky ones work for companies that pay their tuition.

While I know that a degree is the ticket required to enter certain professions, I also know that it is not a guarantee of success. And plenty of people who didn’t go to college do just fine. Maybe my most radical opinion is that a bachelor’s degree has intrinsic value and was never meant to provide job training.

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