Changing careers? Look before you leap

This interview with Linda Clark occurs over coffee in a Wellington cafe, but if that simple description implies an interaction that is relaxed or casual, then it’s misleading. Nothing about Clark comes across as relaxed or casual. These adjectives are about as far from accurately describing her demeanour as seems possible.

That’s not to imply that she is cold or sharp, although some of her interview subjects during her years as TVNZ’s political editor, and subsequently as host of Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme, might disagree. As an interviewer she never suffered fools or obfuscation. But in person she is amusing, polite and – always, always – intensely focused and direct.

She speaks quickly, which only enhances the underlying sense that she’s in a hurry – an impression strengthened by her almost always being in a hurry. She will be leaving this interview, for example, to go to a meeting of the New Zealand Organisation of Rare Diseases, of which she is deputy chairwoman, then it’s back to work in the public law team at Chapman Tripp, and she’ll be out again in time to pick up her sons from their school bus, possibly taking some work home with her.

“I feel I have so many different constituencies to serve in any 24-hour period,” she says, with no hint of complaint. It is just how it is, and she’s getting on with it. The afternoon before this interview, Clark chaired a panel session of a women’s law conference at InterContinental Wellington, with about 300 female lawyers present. Such a role would not be unusual for an experienced law practitioner, but Clark was admitted to the bar only in February. Even in her career, it seems, she’s in a hurry.

Clark was born in England and arrived in New Zealand as a young girl with her mother and stepfather. She grew up in Christchurch and went to the University of Canterbury, where she did the first year of a law degree, but decided to pursue an arts degree, instead. A postgraduate diploma in journalism followed, then a stellar career in broadcasting. She could have had a future in media management, had she wanted it, but that was never her ambition.

In an interview with the Listener when she quit broadcasting in early 2006, she said the fate of Judy Bailey, the popular newsreader dumped amid controversy about her salary, was a spur to change careers. “I stood back and thought about what would happen if I stayed in journalism, and Judy is what happens.

“She’s an extreme example because of the salary package and the controversy and all the rest of it, but we’re talking about a woman who never made a mistake. She never bagged her employer or anybody else, she never took a misstep on screen, she did precisely what her job and her employer asked of her. She still came out on top when it came to those hideously unscientific polls of what viewers want and what they like, and yet she was publicly humiliated and ditched and replaced with a younger blonde.

“While it’s an extreme example, the media eats its own, unless you happen to be smart enough to sidestep into management where you are the one doing the eating. And I don’t have an appetite for either end of that equation.” At that time, Clark said the decision to go had not been sudden. “There was not one day when I suddenly thought ‘I’ve got to get out’; there were 100 of those days in a year of 365.” She says now that when she did that interview, other journalists didn’t seriously believe she was going.

“The response to that article was that I was having some kind of hormonal rush and wasn’t really serious. Other journalistic colleagues, not my close friends, said ‘oh yeah’ and waited to see what I’d do and they were, I think, genuinely surprised that I did want to turn my back on that chapter of my life. Afterwards I was offered columns and various jobs in the media and not one of them caused me a second’s consideration because leaving the media was the right decision. I don’t regret it.”

Along with being “over journalism” and unable to see a future for herself in it – “because with a few venerable exceptions, in New Zealand broadcasting your use-by date is 40” – a significant influence was an interview she did on Nine to Noon with lawyer Colin Keating.

“When I did Nine to Noon it was the lawyers in particular who were really interesting to interview. They thought issues through, they were actively involved in policy debates and really drilling down into issues and the other thing that was so attractive about them was that often they were in their sixties.

“One day I interviewed Colin Keating. I’ve never spoken to him since so he’ll never have known how influential he was for me personally, but he’d been at Chen & Palmer and had just been shoulder-tapped to run a think tank in New York. He came on the programme to talk about it and it was fantastic, absolutely fantastic, and I thought how wonderful that in his sixties along came this opportunity that he would never have anticipated and off he goes to a hugely stimulating new job and a whole new chapter in his life.”

After the interview, Clark said to Keating, “God, if I didn’t have small babies I’d give you my CV.” She says he replied by saying, “Stop thinking like that, you’ve got plenty of time.”

“And that simple statement really planted the seed for me in thinking that you actually can have a second career, and if I was to do so, what would it be? Well, it would be the law, because it fitted with the way I thought.” She returned to university in 2006, starting with one paper in the first year, then doing two per trimester for the past five years, while working part-time at Chapman Tripp, a role she instigated. That connection came about because she had been asked to give some government-relations advice to a company in trouble, and Chapman Tripp was working for the same firm.

“I worked with one of the Chapman Tripp partners on a document and really enjoyed it. I thought, ‘I like this, and I could do this’, and so I went to them with a proposal to ask if we could work together, and they thought about it and said yes. That was a really gutsy thing for them to do, for which I’ll always be thankful.”

She started out doing internal com­munications for Chapman Tripp but soon became much more involved working for clients. The firm’s partners did not consider her lack of a law degree an impediment, she says. “They looked at it more like ‘here’s a client with this kind of problem. Could you help with that? Yes, you could, so we’ll bring you into the team.’ It’s quite a new way of looking at it and that’s how it’s grown. But I was always clear I was doing a law degree to practise as a lawyer. I didn’t do a law degree to do what I did before.

“I do feel in a strange world of my own in a way. I’ve set my own path but I think that career change is fantastic. Obviously I’m an advocate of it and I think it’s essential, because women do find themselves at cul de sacs in their career, and then what do you do? But changing careers is not easy, and I am really mindful that I am luckier than most, because the career I had before gave me a profile that allowed me to have opportunities that other people won’t have.”

Importantly, one of those advantages is that she has not started on a junior lawyer’s salary. “I studied with a couple of other mature students I met along the way and they’re starting out at law firms earning in the mid $30,000s, yet they also had successful careers before they came to the law. It’s hard and that’s not to be underestimated.”

Dave Winsborough is a Wellington psychologist who heads the firm Winsborough Ltd, a company of organisational psychologists. He says that as people live longer and remain in the paid workforce longer than ever before, there is time to consider having more than one career. But how to know whether to make a career change? And if so, the when and to what are not easy to figure out. Winsborough thinks there are probably two main preconditions for deciding it’s time to quit.

The first one is to be successful at what you do. “If even at the peak of your success you’re thinking, ‘This isn’t for me’, then that seems to be important and a better indicator than wanting to quit when you’re failing, or not feeling successful, because, of course, you’re then going to think to yourself, ‘I’ll throw it in,’” he says.

The second is to be realistic about what will happen when you change careers and go back to being at the bottom of the pile and are learning from scratch. “It’s rare to leap from one career to another and be successful in both, and those people stand out because of their rarity. But if you’ve done a realistic preview and you’re convinced that the reasons for leaving are endemic and not just a one-off, then, yes, it’s probably worth considering.”

A big factor to bear in mind, he says, is the potential loss of status in going from something in which a person has been well-respected to starting out in a new career. Career counsellor and psychotherapist Fran Parkin says the most common situation she sees is people who are burnt out and disillusioned. “It’s not uncommon for people to think they have had a gutsful of their careers and want to buy a B&B in Eketahuna. They will say they want something less stressful, ‘where I can breathe, have a life and do the things that matter to me’.

However, Parkin says it is important that people first carefully talk through that urge, because often they will discover that their job is not the real problem, or if it is it might be improved simply by talking to their manager about their hours or the type of work they are doing. Sometimes a new extra-curricular pursuit might be a better option than a wholesale career change.

Also, the process of examining what their current role brings to their life, and considering whether to quit or not, can make people feel as if they have actively chosen to stay, rather than being there because they are stuck. Sometimes people have to quit if they are burnt out and cynical and getting depressed, she says. They need to stop and find their spirit again, because they have got so low they can’t make good decisions.

But for most, the important process is to ask whether the person has good skills, some financial backing from a partner or their own savings, and the emotional resources like confidence that can see him or her through a change. “I have been doing this work for over 20 years and in the early days it was like ‘what’s your dream? You only live one life, go for it.’ But it was much easier to get student loans and part-time work then. I hate to be negative, but the reality is different now.” It’s also very easy to stay put when you’re on a good salary, and it’s courageous to make a career change in those circumstances, says Parkin.

“People realise there is an income trap and so they need to think very carefully about making a change. Quite honestly, in today’s work, people are much less willing to take risks, and I would be much less disposed to encouraging them to take big risks, because it’s just so much tougher out there.” Plenty of people can talk about their career change, but before he does, Alex Webster would first like to say sorry. In the late 1990s, he worked as a lawyer in the Cayman Islands, “doing market transactions, setting up mutual funds, asset-backed securities and all the things that teed everything up for the global financial crisis, for which I sincerely apologise”.

Not that he stopped there. He moved to London, then Hong Kong, but was hating his legal work, so took a job with HSBC doing corporate finance, “which was out of the frying pan into the fire because I hated that even more”. However, he was able to engineer his own redundancy and in 2003 the British-born ex-lawyer arrived in New Zealand. A year later he had married his Kiwi partner, Nicola, bought a house and had twins. He arrived here, he says, “with an unfocused but pretty profound desire to stop being a lawyer and banker and do something on my own.

“I just found the corporate world and that kind of vocational career so depressing. I suppose I could be described as someone with a great future behind him, but every time I contemplated my life, and my future life, and the realisation that what I was doing today was probably exactly the same as what I’d be doing in 30 years’ time, I almost felt suicidal. I think you have to have a certain vocational bent to be able to stand that. If you’re a lawyer, you have to really like law and doing law on a day-to-day basis. I really liked doing transactions, and building up our practice, and opening new offices and bringing in new work; I just hated doing law. You can stand anything for a while – it’s standing it forever that’s hard.”

In Auckland, the couple started their own brand, Coast, specialising in luggage and outdoor beanbags for the decks of boats and baches. Money comes less easily now than when Webster was practising law, but that doesn’t tempt him to return to his previous profession. “Being young and comparatively rich in London and Hong Kong was just awesome, but when you have four children, as I do now, there’s something nice about not living in an apartment in Hong Kong and working 15-hour days on stupid capital-market transactions.

“There are occasions when I look at my peers jetting off to skiing holidays and sailing holidays, but I don’t envy what they have to do on a day-to-day basis in order to afford that. My day-to-day existence, while incredibly frustrating and seemingly an unending amount of work, has great rewards. It’s your thing and you can stand back and say, ‘I did that.’”

Jenny Trafford is managing director of Careering Options, an employment consultancy specialising in contract work for professionals. She thinks midlife is when a number of factors come together, when the desire to throw in the job can also be driven by changes in health or relationships, or even the death of someone close.

“Sometimes when that happens, people go through a time of reflection and think about the purpose of their life – people start to feel mortal. It may be having ageing parents, or a colleague or close friend die, and you ask, ‘What am I actually doing?’ People might also say, ‘There are things that are really important to me that I’d rather do, or want to do more of, and there are other things I want to do less of’, and that is often the time we would encourage people to go and see a career counsellor.

“Some people know what they want to do but others aren’t clear. All they know is that what they are currently doing isn’t really working for them. A career counsellor can provide an opportunity for someone to step back and think carefully about why they are wanting to make a change, their values and where work is sitting in the rest of their life. If one of the things you’re wanting to leave behind is having done huge hours, a lot of pressure and responsibility, are you looking at something that is just going to have the same elements but in a new career, or are you wanting to recalibrate a whole number of things?”

She says people sometimes under­estimate the time commitment, effort and financial sacrifice involved in a career change. “So they need to know if it will require further study. Might they need to relocate? Or what is the future financially in the short and long term if you’ve been an experienced and successful operator in one field and then you retrain in a new area? Potentially you’ll be coming in as, yes, a more experienced graduate but basically you’re entering at a different financial position than you enjoyed before.”

As with Trafford and Parkin, personal development coach Mary Hancock says clients often say they want to do something more meaningful. “I hesitate to say this, because it’s been made so superficial in our society, but really, you need to ask what is your purpose in life, why are you here and what do you really want to do,” says Hancock. She says the important point about the answers to those questions is that they are aligned.

“Who are you, what motivates you, what’s important to you at quite a deep level? I’m not saying that income isn’t a consideration, because you want to be practical about this stuff, but if someone’s saying, ‘I need to change my life, I’ve had enough, I’m bored’, then I suspect it would sometimes be a really poor choice to sell everything up and just go. It needs to be well thought-out.” Hancock also cautions against the adage that if you do something you really love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

“There’s a bit of a misconception that doing what you love and being paid for what you love and following your passion means you will be okay. Sometimes that blinds people to the data and facts. I’m not saying that it never works out, but it’s not usually as simple as saying, ‘I’m not happy with what I’m doing so I’m going to follow what I love.’ For example, there’s nothing wrong with setting up a restaurant because you like food, but if that’s the only driver, then it might be a foolish decision. Whereas if you said, ‘I want to revolutionise the way people engage with food and the way I will do that is to set up a restaurant and I have a clear mission’ – even in that there is a lot more resonance than saying, ‘I like food so I’m going to set up a restaurant.’ It needs to be well thought-out.”

Even with investigation and planning, change takes courage and commitment, she says, and you want to do it well. People operating at a senior level who retrain are likely to be out of their depth for a time till they reach a certain level of competency. “But fear shouldn’t be the only thing stopping you, because if you do all the thinking and align it to what is important to you, then fear is just another thing to get your hands around.”

Trafford says contracting can suit some people as a stepping stone for getting away from the pressures of their career while using their existing skills in different work environments and perhaps making time for more balance in their lives.

Linda Clark hasn’t entirely abandoned her old skills. She’s appearing on TV screens fronting The Court Report, which she sees an ideal marriage of her two careers, but says it does not signal a return to her old stomping ground in front of a camera or behind a microphone. “I haven’t sought any public profile and I turn down speaking engagements most of the time. I’ve done two election-night specials for TV3 and that’s enough for me.”

She remains “a political junkie”, however, and even though she hasn’t been in the parliamentary Press Gallery for 10 years now, and quit radio six years ago, people still ask her about politics. “It makes you realise that those jobs aren’t to be taken lightly.”

She is well aware of some of the statistics about women in the law – women comprise 62% of law graduates yet less than 26% of the judiciary, 18% of partners in big law firms, and 12% of Queen’s or Senior Counsels. Some of those figures can be explained by women with children choosing not to take on additional workloads at the office, but even though Clark is one of those women herself, she is among those who believe that motherhood alone cannot wholly explain the discrepancy between male and female lawyers’ career paths. Eventually she would like to build up a media-law practice, but for now her career ambitions are tempered by her determination to be present in the lives of her family, particularly 10-year-old twins Arlo and Harper.

“My career defines me but I didn’t want it to be a defining point for them and their childhood. I wanted them to feel like I’m available to them and actually, availability is presence. This idea that you might be able to touch base late at night and read them a story is not real. When I was doing Nine to Noon, I had a full-time nanny, but by the time they went to school I had realised I needed to be more there, and that’s where you come back to flexible work practices, because that’s the ultimate dilemma for women. You want to be at home and to have a stimulating job, but to have a stimulating job, most of the time you need to be at work. You can’t be in two places at once, so you have to work for employers who will accommodate that as best they can. I don’t know how small firms can do it.”

Flexible workplaces require flexibility from two parties: the employer and the employee, she says. “It’s actually give and give, and that’s certainly been my approach.

“I’ve been at Chapman Tripp five years working part-time but always to a deadline, so I try to organise my time to fit it within school hours. But if I can’t do that, then I will work at night once the kids are in bed and that’s just life. I don’t resent that – it’s part of my giving to the flexible equation and their giving is that no one lifts an eyebrow when I walk out the door at 3.20pm to go and pick up my children from the school bus.

“I feel a responsibility to make flexibility work, because then it’s easier for somebody else inside Chapman Tripp to say they want to do it, but by the same token you can’t have everyone working flexibly. Someone has to be there between three and 5pm, and I owe a great deal to the other people in my team who do that. I’m not saying that in some subservient tone. I don’t think women who work flexible hours need to feel defensive about that, or that they owe everyone else a favour, but I do think you have to acknowledge that other people are there, and thank goodness they are.”

THE COURT REPORT, TVNZ 7, Thursdays, 9.30pm.