Anonymous writes: Hi! I have a M.S. degree in applied mathematics. I have been in public education for 16 years. I have also been teaching at a junior college part-time since 1994. I have been Mathematics Department chair since 1998. I don’t know what I am qualified for other than education. Where can I look? Thank you.
The Career Doctor responds: Let’s start with your obvious love of math and numbers. Having a flair for math means that you should also be strong in a number of related skills, such as: problem-solving, analyzing and interpreting data, and critical and logical thinking. Since you have also been a department chair for so many years, I am guessing you also have good leadership, delegation, people-management skills.
Where can you look to see what else you’re qualified to do? It’s harder than you think — you need to look inside yourself first. I want you to spend some time doing a couple of exercises. First, you need to make a detailed list of all the skills where you excel, such as some of the one I mentioned in the first paragraph. Second, from the list of skills you just created, circle the skills that you enjoy the most and scratch the skills you really don’t want to do anymore. Third, think about other skills and activities you enjoy outside of your work — and make a list of those. Fourth, now see if you can combine all the positives into a new list of skills and activities you enjoy.
Now that you have completed your list, it’s time to do a little investigating about possible career opportunities for you. Assuming you still want to work in a field that uses your math/logic skills, you might consider perusing the Websites of various math, statistics, logistics associations, such as the American Mathematical Association or the American Statistical Association, which both have all sorts of good career and job information.
Of course, if your interests have moved away from both education and math, I suggest a much deeper examination of where you want your career to go next. I recommend you read my article, The 10-Step Plan to Career Change.
