This is a great idea for a thread, @digmedia. We can plan all we want, but life has a funny way of adding unexpected forks in the road.
I have a degree in broadcast production/management. My career looked like this:
Computer ad design
Newspaper reporter
Radio ad copywriter
TV traffic coordinator
TV technical director (small market)
TV technical director (large market)
After our children were born I decided that I wanted to homeschool, but I didn’t want to give up my job. I actually attempted to do both for awhile, but I worked at a station in a large market 2 hours (one way) from where we lived; the travel was too much but the cost of living there was too high for us to own a home and save for our kids’ college, so I quit. My plan was to homeschool full-time and work part-time closer to home.
It didn’t work out that way. Our youngest is dyslexic, dyscalculic, and dysgraphic so homeschooling turned into two full-time jobs – teaching during the day and creating curriculum tailored to my daughter at night. Over the years I have done some freelance work (creating promotional materials, writing ad copy, and teaching classes), but haven’t been able to work regular hours for a company.
My daughter will be graduating soon and when she heads to college, I want to return to school and get a computer science degree (with maybe a minor in psych). I’ll be in my early 50’s when I start so I don’t know if I’ll be too old to get a job, but I’d love to write educational programs for students like my daughter.
My path isn’t what I expected, but it’s worked out well for me because I’ve been lucky. I’m healthy (my dad was going blind at my age), I’m still married, and my husband will have a pension when he retires, so I have a backup in case I can’t find work and have to create my own. But I don’t think I’d recommend it to my own children. Too many things have to go right for it to work out.