What safety nets are necessary to pivot a career change that involves going to school to learn a new skill set? Do we have to choose between purpose and profit? Especially in the creative field, do I have to start my 10,000 hours over and rebuild? For context, I am a senior account manager at a tech staffing company and have been looking to go to film school.I don’t believe in safety nets.
There are different ways to approach your pivot. If you choose to go to school full-time, you may have to take out loans and consolidate your life by downsizing your living space and maybe picking up work on the side. There’s always the option of keeping your day job and enrolling in a film program that offers courses on nights and weekends.
Plenty of people have taken big bets on themselves by making midcareer pivots to varying degrees of success. I recommend studying the career paths of people whom you admire or relate to. Take Ava DuVernay as an example.or schooling as a film director, but she was able to leverage her years of experience and contacts as a film publicist to plot out a directing career to great success. But she talks openly about the sacrifices that came with it.
It may seem scary to take a big leap into the unknown — especially if you’re going from profitable work with guaranteed paychecks to passion-fueled projects with unknown returns — but the consequences of staying on a path where you’re no longer growing, fulfilled or inspired are far scarier than doing what it takes to set yourself up for success in a new adventure. Will there be some sacrifice? Yes. Will it always feel worth it? Maybe not.