C&EN Washington

Sometimes when people leave their jobs to start entirely new careers, it takes everybody else by surprise--especially their colleagues and bosses. But maybe it shouldn't.

In the September/October 1999 issue of theHarvard Business Review, Harvard University psychologists Timothy Butler and James Waldroop explain why people make radical job transitions. Usually, they say, these exits are written off to reasons such as: "She got an offer she couldn't refuse" or "No one stays with a company for very long these days." But on the basis of 12 years of research, the authors believe there's much more to it than that. They say many managers don't understand the psychology of work satisfaction; they assume that people who excel at their work are also happy in their jobs. And, although that sounds logical, strong job skills don't necessarily have much to do with job satisfaction, they report.

Butler and Waldroop conclude that people stay in jobs only if the job "matches their deeply embedded life interests." By this they mean something far deeper than hobbies and enthusiasms. Not opera or skiing. Not the stock market or Chinese history, they say. "Instead, deeply imbedded life interests are long-held, emotionally driven passions, intricately entwined with personality." The authors point out that these life interests don't determine what a person is good at; they determine what kinds of activities make people happy. And these interests make themselves visible in childhood, if anyone is looking carefully enough.

C&EN asked its readers who had made substantial job transitions in the middle of or late into their careers to share their stories. In general, the 30 people who responded had many years of experience in traditional academic or industrial chemistry jobs. Some of them changed the focus of their careers; some changed careers completely.

For the most part, those who underwent major job transitions planned their exits for quite some time and ended up happy about taking the leap. A few others made quicker transitions, spurred by job layoffs. In general, they weren't happy and were looking to move on again.

One person sums up what many told C&EN: "I feel very strongly that, for people to live happy lives, the more of who you are that you can bring to your job, the better you'll do the job, the happier you'll be, and the greater the contribution that you will be able to make to the world."

Susan Hadden agrees. She is in a transition state. She has worked as an organic chemist for about 10 years, first for two years in agricultural herbicide discovery and then for about eight years in pharmaceutical discovery. For the past six years, she has been deeply involved in managing her company's compound library and the implementation of automated sample preparation for high-throughput screening.

But she is training to be a nurse and going to school at night to get a degree. "The decision to change careers grew slowly, since I was not forced to do so by circumstances beyond my control," she says. "When the desire to do something else became strong enough, I acted upon it."

She chose nursing for several reasons. "The strongest reason is that I had a desire for more personal fulfillment," Hadden says. "I want to make a difference to someone." Hadden has been an emergency medical technician with a local volunteer fire and emergency station for about eight years and finds it very rewarding. In fact, most aspects of her life that are rewarding have been outside her chemistry career. "Also, nursing provides more flexible job opportunities both in terms of workhours and fields of interest," she says. "You can work full time, part time, night time, evening shift, hospital staff, education, school nurse, pediatrics, operating room, emergency, geriatrics, clinical research, pharmaceutical companies--the list goes on and on."

Hadden and her husband don't have children yet, so she says finances aren't a big worry, even though she knows she is going to take a salary cut. "My husband supports the decision because he began his career as an electrical engineer only to 'retire' after five years to become a drummer in a reggae band," she says. "I often joke that this is my midlife crisis, but it's not a crisis at all. I feel great about it."

According to Hadden, people's reactions to her career transition have been fascinating. "Most people think nursing is a step down in both status and income," she says. "Most of my coworkers think I am crazy. I'm not sure what my boss thinks inside, but he knows I will give him 100% until I leave, and so he treats me the same as he always has. A few people confess a desire to do the same but fear the process or the consequences." Most nurses, however, give her hugs and welcome her to their family, she says.

A warm welcome to the family is exactly what Ed Watkins has been providing for his two children. Watkins received a Ph.D. degree in physical organic chemistry and worked for Dow Chemical for three years and then Pfizer for 10 years. When the company that bought his division of Pfizer moved from the Pfizer site, he took a severance package rather than move to a more expensive area away from his wife's work. "In September 1997, a little boy--then 4--and his sister--then 6--came into our custody while awaiting adoption. Since that time, I have served as a stay-at-home parent." The Watkinses adopted the children in April 1999.

"If staying at home is suitable for you, then you should do it," he says. "Frankly, I had looked forward to it for a while. When Pfizer management mentioned the possibility of our division getting sold, there was the insecurity and difficulties with transitions, but I also thought that this would be a good time to sit back and reevaluate."

During 1998 and 1999, he looked into funding sources to enable him to work in molecular modeling research. "In April 1999," he explains, "a Yale professor and I submitted a two-year National Institutes of Health proposal to study the binding of potential drugs with HIV proteins. This proposal was submitted under a supplemental grant program (S1) to enhance the careers of scientists who have been out of the workforce due to family responsibilities." The grant money was approved in June, and Watkins is working as a junior faculty member at Yale.

Sujata Gamage, a former member of the chemistry faculty at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, stayed at home for two years with her third child, but she started looking to get back into the job market in 1990. "I thought it would be a good time to move from basic chemistry to a more applied field," she recalls. "After a fruitless search, I thought I'd take a postdoc position. I wanted to do heterogeneous catalysis, with more of a chemical engineering bent, but there weren't any postdocs available in that field in Columbus, Ohio, at that time. I was constrained to live in that area due to family reasons."

But she did get several postdoc offers to do enzyme catalysis studies. "The postdoc job market in a way fooled me into accepting a postdoc in that area," she says. "I started with enthusiasm, but halfway through my postdoc, I realized what a dead end that career track was. I saw too many good people rotting in postdoc positions. I got out of the postdoc after two years and took a part-time editing job.

"I could see that my family, my coworkers, and professors were worried about me. I can't blame them," Gamage says. "I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do, and in 1992 there weren't a whole lot of jobs in anything. I could not afford to spend time and resources to explore my options. I did some teaching here and there to tide us over financial difficulties, but it was not enough."

In the midst of this desperate time, Gamage got a full-time job as a consultant to university research support programs in the state of Ohio in April 1996. She says it was at that time that she found a new focus and a new energy. "I guess I've been on a roll since then," she says. "Issues in higher education, particularly those having to do with research and graduate education issues, are close to my heart. My research and teaching experience are extremely valuable to my work. In my current job, I get to do policy research that interests me, and also I occasionally see my ideas contribute to good policy. Public-sector work does not pay a whole lot, and my current job does not actually reward me for my Ph.D. or my training in science, but I have fun doing what I do.

"I am determined to catch up with my colleagues who have had uninterrupted careers," she continues. "The next three to four years are critical for me. During that period, I want to see myself established as an expert in higher education issues. My current research program should make a significant contribution to understanding and evaluating the contribution of higher education to knowledge generation, workforce development, and technology transfer. I am also developing methods to evaluate processes that are thought to be critical for continued productivity of universities."

Like Gamage, Mike Johnson has made a big transition--just in a different direction. Johnson was drawn to a laboratory chemistry career. The problem was, he started out in banking and didn't decide to pursue a chemistry degree until he was in his late 30s. And this isn't an easy transition to make. "In 1991," Johnson tells C&EN, "I was a commercial lending officer in a midsized bank in St. Louis, and I was finding little challenge or reward in my position. After considerable research, I decided on a career in chemistry and promptly started on the necessary coursework. I earned my B.S. degree in January of this year, and I am currently working as an analytical chemist at a small pharmaceutical firm, Meridian Medical Technologies in St. Louis. The work is very interesting, challenging, and far more personally rewarding than my 19-year banking career ever was."

Johnson says he "kind of fell into banking right after high school." A friend worked in a bank as a teller, and Johnson didn't have any specific career plans, so he took a job there. "One thing led to another," he recalls, "and I kept asking for more work and different assignments at the bank. I started getting promoted, and that's when it became a career. I just kept doing it."

At the bank, he moved from teller to installment lending, retail banking, commercial banking, and business development. "It got to be very sales oriented, and that was something I had promised myself I was going to stay away from.

"Some people really eat that up. They like the things like taking customers out to dinner and to hockey games and ball games," Johnson says. "It sounds glamorous if you like it. And it was fun for a while, but the more involved I became in sales work, the less reward I got out of it. I could still do it, but it wasn't making me feel good about what I was doing or about myself."

Johnson says he hadn't planned to do anything dramatic. He first tried to move to other areas within the bank and choose something different that would not involve sales. But he had gotten to the level where he couldn't make a dramatic job change.

Unwilling to be doomed by his success, he reached the conclusion that he was going to have to do something different, he says, but he didn't have any idea what that was going to be. "I had worked my way into this awful situation," he says. "I had to be very careful and make as objective a decision as possible about what I should do next."

Johnson had always had an interest in anything that had to do with "atoms or molecules or physics or chemistry. I would always be interested in anything like that. But I didn't see the possibilities, so I let it go as a side interest," he says.

"When I realized that I was going to make a change--and it was going to be a big change--I sat down with a career counselor and made up a laundry list of a dozen different areas of interest. I started going to the library and reading up on different careers. If one sounded interesting, I'd weigh out how much education I would need to get. I asked, 'Can I do this career with a bachelor's degree or will I need a Ph.D. degree? What kinds of things do you do every day?' If I got past that and was still interested, then I tried to go out and meet somebody, find somebody somewhere somehow who did that for a living."

A couple of people at Mallinckrodt talked to him, as did a couple of senior-level chemists at Monsanto. "Most people felt that I was taking a pretty big risk," Johnson says. "They said, 'You're not 20 anymore. You might run into some problems.' But I thought a bachelor's in chemistry was something I could do, even though I knew I'd be over 40 when I finished. And my age has made a difference.

"Most of the people I talked to were trying to get out of the science side of things and into the business side, so I got a lot of that. It was strange, here I was trying to get in, and here they were with only two semesters until they got their M.B.A., and they were trying to get out," he adds.

One of those looking to get out of the strictly science side and who is now in a more financially oriented career is George Huhn. Huhn started his career at DuPont as a Drexel University co-op student and later became a full-time senior research scientist in a DuPont joint venture. "I figured I could do this for the rest of my life or try something else," he says. "The work I was doing was interesting, but I decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the laboratory. I realized that there were many more parts of me that I could bring to my work than I could working in the lab," he says.

Huhn decided to become a consultant because he wanted to develop people and organizations. He was also very interested in the creative process, and had enjoyed some work he did within DuPont to improve the organization by using deliberate creativity techniques.

Like Johnson, Huhn planned his career transition carefully, starting two years before he left DuPont. But when he announced that he was going to leave, some people were astonished. "People couldn't understand why I'd leave such a 'secure' job. Other people, who I knew weren't happy in their jobs, told me that they could never change careers--not enough time or money some other reason," Huhn recalls.

To those who think they don't have the time to carefully plan a career transition, Huhn says, "If you can put one hour a day in, just seven hours per week, in a year, you've put in nine weeks of work. You can do a lot in nine weeks.

"It's also good to have an ally," he says. "Not necessarily somebody in the company, but somebody who understands what you're doing and maybe has also done it. Find someone who is encouraging, supportive, and also discreet, because this is not something you necessarily want to broadcast," he says.

Huhn worked as an independent consultant after leaving DuPont, and then joined K. W. Tunnell Co. in King of Prussia, Pa. He began doing technology development consulting--helping people and companies use their knowledge, skills, and technology to improve their processes. "I worked on building a new consulting practice for the company. I called it Total Technology Management, and it's a systematic way of looking at a project and figuring out what technology we need, and how, when, and where we're going to find it. We showed companies how to integrate knowledge and technical milestones into project plans. It's a complex system, but it works very well," he says.

Meanwhile, he also earned a master's degree in technology management from the University of Pennsylvania. "It's a fascinating curriculum, equally divided between business courses from the Wharton Business School and technology courses from the engineering school. It's designed to teach technical managers how to leverage technology and business to develop new products and keep companies going strong," he explains.

Huhn has recently taken one more leap, leaving Tunnell to become vice president of an Internet company called OmniAlert.com, which provides real-time market data and news alerts to wireless devices. "The whole point that I want to make is that a chemist who doesn't want to be a chemist anymore has a tremendous asset in their training and experience that they can use to go forward into the world and do other things, no matter what they are," Huhn says.

In addition to patience, people contemplating career changes also need to be flexible, according to Jim Kauer. A synthetic organic chemist for more than 30 years, Kauer had always been interested in the application of organic chemistry to biological problems. "I took the leap 12 years ago when I turned 60," he says. "I had been in DuPont Central Research for 30 years, about seven of which were spent in the neuroscience group." Kauer was the only chemist of the group, which consisted mostly of biologists and neuroscientists. The group was broken up, but Kauer had caught the neuroscience research bug.

Kauer had already decided to try to continue in neuroscience. Then, he says, "one of the people in the DuPont group received a call from a venture capitalist who was trying to get a neuroscience group under way. That's how it happened. This fellow, who is now our chief executive officer--Frank Baldino Jr.--contacted me and several of the others to see if we were interested. He said he wanted Cephalon to be a chemistry-driven company, and those were the words that convinced me."

Because he was 60, Kauer was able to take official retirement from DuPont. "The other fellows were much younger," he says. "But off we went and in due course rented some facilities in nearby Pennsylvania, and we started the company. We then got additional funding from collaborations with other companies--such as Schering-Plough and SmithKline Beecham. Twelve years later, we number about 300 employees. We have one product on the market for narcolepsy and three others in clinical trials--one for Parkinson's disease. We got off on a sidetrack onto cancer, so we have two drugs in clinical trials for solid tumors."

Kauer had a lot of experience with patents at DuPont, and although he wasn't actually writing them, he aided in their prosecution. "DuPont had a very sophisticated patent operation, and in our central research department there were chemists who had stopped doing lab work but were specializing in patent work. So I was familiar with patents. And at the time I joined Cephalon, I was the only one who had seen a patent," he says. "I was the only one who did the patent work, but as soon as I could, I hired a patent expert--George Sauson, who was ready to retire from DuPont--and, until a few months ago, he was our in-house patent group." At that time, the company hired other people to work with Sauson.

S. Bruce Brown can testify to the attractiveness of a career in intellectual property management. Brown, a chemist at General Electric's Corporate R&D Center in Schenectady, N.Y., for 17 years, decided to leave the lab primarily because he had no desire to retire; he also plans way ahead. As a scientist, he says, "I am in a profession where someone else will always have to provide me with a work space. I faced the fact that, if I wanted to remain active in technology for the rest of my life, I had to develop skills that would allow me to go literally anywhere in the world and work from my home with a computer and access to a good technical library."

Brown had worked with patent attorneys at GE for years and liked it. "They had a very logical way of thinking and, as happens in so many of these cases, I worked primarily with one attorney, and he became a role model and mentor to me," he recalls.

"In addition, there was a scientist with whom I worked who has always been a good friend. He and I had worked together in the chem lab, and then he moved from the R&D center to GE Plastics and worked there for a number of years very successfully. Then, he decided that he wanted to make the move to legal at GE Plastics, and they agreed to let him do that--they even paid his way through law school. He was the very first tech person at GE who came from the tech side to work in the legal group. He paved the way for me; he was my key role model," Brown says.

Brown believes that he is especially effective working in GE's legal organization because he knows all the R&D center chemists personally, has worked with almost all of them, and has a deep respect for them. "I know the demands on their time and what they have to do to produce top-quality research. So there's a high degree of trust between us," he says. "More important, since I've worked in the areas they're working in, I know what questions to ask. So I can help them out in terms of patentability, what further experiments they should do, and what we should plan to do in the future."

Knowing what questions to ask is important, and Wendy Horn started asking questions and planning for her future a couple of years before she made her career transition. Horn had been in the lab at Merck for quite a few years and enjoyed it. But then she decided to set up shop as a freelance medical writer. "I liked my coworkers, and I liked the projects," she says. "But I had spent a very long time doing similar things, and I just had a desire for change, I really did. It was that simple."

She believes that because she is the child of business owners, starting her own business didn't seem as scary to her as it does to other people. "I saw my mom and dad make their living and be perfectly happy running their own small medical supplies business. Dad started off as a detail man for a big pharmaceutical company and worked his way up and eventually decided to open shop himself. So, to me, this seems very normal--not risky."

Horn spent her last two years at Merck in the marketing communications department. There she found out how much she liked writing. Although she did not start working as a freelance medical writer while she was employed at Merck, she did begin planning for her new career. She joined the American Medical Writers Association, where she met a lot of other freelancers and talked to them about their problems and their joys. She believes that networking is very important for those contemplating career changes, a thought expressed by many interviewed by C&EN.

When she said she was leaving Merck, Horn says, her colleagues were supportive but really couldn't believe it. "But most people were kind of excited," she says. "It was a way for them to see how this kind of thing works without having to do it themselves," she says. "Some of them expressed their own fears--for example, 'You'll lose your stock options.' "

But Horn got her first freelance job her very first day on her own and earned more her first year on her own than she did her last year at Merck. "Somebody called up and asked if I could write a manuscript from a clinical study. This is a typical kind of assignment," she says. Horn explains that, when a pharmaceutical company is launching a new drug, the company has a lot of studies to publish, and it needs product monographs and disease monographs and information. During the course of marketing a drug, a pharmaceutical company will put out review articles and journal supplements. The firm also will sponsor symposia and want newsletters written from them to update people on what's happening in the field. "There is a lot of work out there," Horn says.

"I sometimes miss the lab, because the work was very interesting and I really liked working at Merck," she says. And being a freelancer does have its down side. "You are alone most of the time," Horn notes. "You're a little bit isolated; you have to make the effort to speak to people. You have to deal with the financial end of it. If you're uncomfortable setting fees and invoicing, maybe this isn't for you."

Another chemist who found satisfaction in the publishing arena is Tom Zebovitz, who today owns a technical typesetting company. He says he was never a corporate-type person, no matter how hard he tried. And he thinks people picked up on it in interviews as soon as he was out of graduate school. "Because my dissertation was on vinblastine, a treatment for cancer, I thought that I'd definitely be directed toward pharmaceutical companies. I had a number of interviews, and I didn't get a single offer. Already they could tell that I wasn't a team player."

He worked for a small flavors and fragrances company in New York City--Fritsche, Dodge & Olcott (FDO)--for three years. "It was at that job that I got my first taste of working in a corporate atmosphere, and I found it quite distasteful."

During this time, Zebovitz attended an American Chemical Society meeting in New York City. At a publisher's booth in the exposition, the chief executive officer of the company approached Zebovitz and asked if he would consider writing a volume on flavor and fragrance chemicals. "I was flattered and we exchanged cards," he recalls.

When he broached the subject with the director of research at FDO, Zebovitz says he got a negative response. "I decided to do the project on my evenings and weekends and never brought it up again on the job," he says.

"I finished the book with the assistance of my wife, Janice, and the publisher was impressed at our ability to combine chemical graphics and text on the same page. I mentioned that Janice was staying at home raising our sons and was looking for work. The publisher offered to teach us page composition in order to set books by other authors. At that point, I began to see alternatives to my career in chemistry, and I set out with a plan to expand my fledgling business into a full-time occupation," he says.

In the meantime, he found other chemistry employment but continued to be discouraged working in a corporate environment.

"Finally, running my own company--Technical Typesetters--I can make the difference I have always wanted to," he says. "With my background in the sciences and math, I have been able to set the works of my colleagues accurately, query the authors about potential errors, and be a force in the publishing world for quality and accuracy. Technical Typesetters has been rewarded with the privilege of setting some of the seminal works in the field, the most recent being Fieser & Fieser's 'Reagents for Organic Synthesis.' Having a role in the production of such works is extremely fulfilling to me."

Technical Typesetters today consists of about 30 employees and contractors. "We have developed innovative methods of management and workflow to assure quality in our products as well as assembling an excellent team of production editors," Zebovitz says. The company produces 250 publications per year.

Some career transitions can take place within the same job when workers change focus. Morton Z. Hoffman has had an uninterrupted career as a professor of chemistry (see page 84). "Inasmuch as I started at Boston University (BU) as an assistant professor and will probably end there as the late professor, I haven't been one of those chemists who has changed jobs or geographic location," he tells C&EN.

What has changed--and changed radically--has been the orientation of his career. "When I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and thought about a future in teaching, I saw myself at a small liberal arts college, not unlike the one I went to, where I could have a close relationship with the undergraduates and engage those who were interested in research, all on a bucolically beautiful campus. Instead, after a postdoctoral year in England, I found myself hired sight-unseen by a large, sprawling university along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston."

Hoffman explains that, although the development of a specialized general chemistry course was his initial assignment, the tenure expectation bar was rapidly rising. "It was quite clear that I had better get my research act together, seek and acquire grants, and publish in order not to perish," he says.

Thirty-five years, more than $3.5 million in grants, and 200 publications later, Hoffman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of the highest teaching award at BU. "At the same time, I found it increasingly more difficult to remain competitively creative in research," he says candidly. "After a terminal grant award and an unsuccessful proposal application, the completion of Ph.D. degrees by my last three graduate students, and without research support or the prospect of new graduate students, I decided to end my active research career."

This was in 1997, a very difficult year for Hoffman. BU closed the Center for Teaching Excellence, which he had founded, because of fiscal exigencies. "It took about a year for me to regain my focus," Hoffman says, "aided immeasurably by the support of my family, departmental chair, colleagues, and friends. I decided to devote my professional life fully to the things I have really loved the best all the time: teaching, the promotion of chemical education, and the students." So he has redoubled his efforts to be a more effective classroom teacher and has contributed a large chunk of time to ACS on a national, regional, and local level. As a result, he has derived "an enormous amount of personal satisfaction."

"Think of deeply embedded life interest as a geothermal pool of superheated water," write Butler and Waldroop inHarvard Business Review. "It will rise to the surface in one place as a hot spring and in another as a geyser. But beneath the surface--at the core of the individual--the pool is constantly bubbling. Deeply embedded life interests always seem to find expression, even if a person has to change jobs--or careers--for that to happen."

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