A career change might appear to be a scary thing when you have worked towards one specific career your entire life. However, career changes are actually quite a common phenomenon with the average person changing their career at least three times throughout their life.

One of the most common career changes is becoming a teacher. Most people who are teachers had, at some point, another career before deciding to teach others about what they know. This makes sense considering getting experience in things before you teach them is usually something you would like to do. Women are more likely to change their careers to become teachers. This aligns with the percentage of women and men in the teaching profession with women making up 77 percent of the workforce.

There are multiple reasons that contribute to career changes. One of the reasons that has been attributed to career changes is actually personality. People who are extroverted are found to be more likely to change their careers when compared to those who are introverted. This could be because extroverted people tend to meet more people outside of their current workplace which allows them to know more about different available careers.

Also, those who are more open to experiencing new things have a bigger probability of changing their careers. People who are open to new experiences are constantly finding new things that they like and that they might want a career out of.

Another contributor to career change is age and job security. People who are under thirty show more traits that make them want to change careers. Traits such as flexibility, curiosity and they also don’t have much human capital, which is experience or education in a single career. Considering they don’t have much investment in their jobs when compared to people above thirty, they are less likely to believe they have already put too much into their current career which allows them to change it.

Job security also causes people to change their careers because people tend to gravitate towards a career that is not likely to fire them or put them in dangerous situations. If their current job doesn’t offer them the security that another job could, there is a bigger possibility that they will change their careers. Teaching absolutely allows for job security.

While career changes can be quite a nerve-wracking experience, many MCHS teachers have gone through the process. Two of those teachers are English and AVID teacher Kathleen Peterson and Algebra teacher Norio Kaneko.

Peterson used to work in the travel industry while attending Orange Coast College and she used to work at day camps while attending San Francisco State.

“I loved working in travel because I love traveling. I loved getting discounts to travel and being able to try new things,” Peterson said.

“One of my professors at OCC convinced me to enroll in his Introduction to Teaching course. That moment changed the trajectory of my life…I was lucky to be young enough that the change of careers was not that hard,” Peterson said.

This shows that following your passions, being open to trying new things, and being young allows for more career changes as well as finding more satisfaction in a career.

Kaneko used to work in business and real estate. His reasoning for working there was that it opened many opportunities for him and brought in decent money. Despite this, he expressed dissatisfaction with his career.

“People made it hard to work with them. Their bad attitude made it hard to enjoy the work. I found that I don’t live to work, I work to live,” Kaneko said.

“Anybody looking for a career should first explore themselves. Find what you like and who you are and build your work around that. The center of your universe should never be your job. The center of the universe should be what you want; the job should just fund it,” Kaneko said.

This shows that our peers have explored many things in their lives until they found what they enjoyed. Of course, changing careers might have been stressful, but finding satisfaction in teaching and their personal lives because of their career change shows that it was worth it.