Last November, after 23 years, 8 Months and 26 days (but who’s counting) working for the same company, in the same town, in the same organization, I was laid off from my job as a Premium Corporate Support Manager for a large computer tech company. This situation is not an uncommon occurrence in any industry, and I suppose my situation was better than most as I had seen the writing on the wall when my company seemed determined to move the jobs that had been at our site for over two decades to another state.
The good news was, after such a long tenure, I was eligible for not only a decent severance (about a year’s pay) but also extended benefits including, if I wanted it, retraining benefits. So, if I wanted to back to school to get a degree in a field where there were local jobs, I could, and the trade Act provisions would pay all tuition and expenses. Given that this seemed like a kind of “get out of work free” card, AND would allow me to pursue learning some skills I was very much interested in, I took the plunge.
Now, for the last few years, when I wasn’t at work at my day job, I spent my time in my home workshop. My shop was slightly cramped but well outfitted with a large number of woodworking and metalworking tools. I had made my shop into a kind of “Makerspace” for friends and friends of friends. Every weekend, I opened up the shop and let folks come and use my tools, space, and advice for whatever projects they wanted to work on. Fixing a wheelbarrow, welding a new railing for their stairs, or even fixing a thrift store Hanna Montana guitar for their daughter. Now and then we had a class on welding, making cutting boards, or some other skill people were interested in learning more about. During this time I had also taken up machining as a hobby, learning to use a metal lathe and milling machine, mainly from books and ubiquitous YouTube videos. When the layoff happened, however, it gave me an opportunity to take up machining as a serious career option. When I got the approval to go back to school, it was to pursue a 2 year degree in Manufacturing Technology and CNC programming. This was what we used to call “Machine Shop” back in high school.
While there were any number of challenges coming back to school 35 years since I last set foot in a classroom, the biggest challenge for me personally seemed to be the drastic differences between my previous career as a Support Manager, and this new one as a student machinist.
In my new path, I was no longer the person who knew the most, but one who knew the least. That alone took some getting used to. But the real differences were in the requirements of the two professions. At my previous job, I was a senior manager and one of the longest-tenured employees at the site. I was valued for my knowledge, people skills, decision making. I took a personal interest in my team and their well-being. I knew Vice Presidents of many of the companies that were our customers, as I had been the person they had called in the middle of the night when they had a problem that my team could help fix.
As a machining student, the two main area of focus my first term were Math, and hands-on machining projects in the machine shop. I soon found that all of my lauded skills from my previous job seemed to be worth very little in either Math Class or Machine Shop. Being charming couldn’t help make a part that I machined a few thousandths of an inch too short, fit its companion part. All of my people skills couldn’t convince a metal lathe into cutting an accurate piece, as if it were a ticked off customer that my team had failed to help. None of my previously valued decision-making skills could help me remember the correct mathematical method for figuring the cosine of a triangle. These new requirements were specific, concrete and constant, where all of my practiced skills seemed to be more fluid, ethereal and nebulous.
In the world of Management, the key desired characteristics in managers are things like leadership, experience, communication, knowledge, confidence, and respect for employees. In the machine shop, while any number of those things might be of some benefit, knowledge, and experience would be the main if not only overlaps…and because most of what I was learning now was new to me, I didn’t have much knowledge and related experience to fall back on.
I soon realized that one particular difference was the amount of new information I was processing each day. Old job: most days, about 95% of what I did relied on information or knowledge I already had, and I only took in maybe 5% of new information/knowledge. This approach allowed me to lean heavily on my accumulated knowledge rather than having to have my brain in “learning mode” and focus on picking up and processing new information and details. New life: School seems to be almost the exact inverse. Around 95% of what I am doing every day is new, whether it was learning or relearning geometry and trigonometry equations, or learning how to cut a groove in a piece of cold rolled steel at a 60-degree angle. This change was probably the most significant. My brain felt ‘lazy.’ So much new info was coming in, and I was simply not used to processing so much new data…and I was way out of practice in organizing my learning modes.
Slowly but surely I’ve been finding ways to adjust and get my brain in sync with the new paradigm. I’m getting better at absorbing the new info, making sure to take notes, so I don’t miss things, and in general, learning how to learn again. The process has been a little slower than I anticipated and I took a few hits to my ego in the first few months, but overall, I am enjoying the challenges in this new course I’ve set for myself. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new path takes me and what other things I will learn along the way.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
– Robert Frost