Career Path Work

Career Path Work; ideally nothing more than 15 to 20 years (hopefully less!)

This article will begin after necessary education, training, certifications, and licensing have been completed. Modern education is a topic that requires its own article. Much of this article is not even relevant for early work such as internships, residency, or fellowships. Even entry level jobs are excluded. This conversation begins when an individual achieves their first real adult employment or business ownership opportunity. That is the definition of career path work.

For some of us this starts when we buy into or buy the entire business. For others, it is when we land the first job with true responsibilities. And, for a few of us, it starts when that dream start up materializes from a concept to a real legal business entity. It could be commissioning as an officer in the military. Or, it could be completion of trade school and starting to manage projects. Currently, there is also a chance a person has stacked enough technical skills, experiences, or certificates to be ready for a real job. For many of us, this is the first time we start adulting regardless of age.

Corporate America has changed so much over the last three generations. While we can all acknowledge benefit packages are more expensive and complicated than in the past, corporate America has decreased their effort and effectiveness in providing for their employees. From the prospective of the employee, corporate America deserves less of employees efforts, commitment, and loyalty.  Their behavior created quiet quitting.

Sharing a few personal stories will help put this into prospective. My father worked his way up to become a manager in a Fortune 500 company. He was given stock options and a matched retirement plan that was very generous. After about 30 years, the company restructured and he was offered a premium retirement package at age 52. My father continued to work at other jobs until almost 70. He was able to keep his medical, dental, and vision insurance after retiring at age 52. My father passed away at just over 80. My mother still survives him today. After my father passed, my mother got a letter telling her they wanted her to keep the insurance which were all premium Medicare supplementals. She was also informed she would continue to get the annual retirement gift each year valued at several hundred dollars. 30 years after retirement, the company still shows respect for the contributions of my father. And, our family has very serious brand loyalty to that corporation. 

My wife’s father went to work at the power company straight out of high school. He was a loyal employee who worked his way up to a senior level Forman position. He was well known for bringing his grills and managing all the celebrations of the crews. They should have called him chief morale officer; especially during storms when the crews would work for days with little sleep to restore community power.  He was rewarded with amazing gifts for service time milestones like a Rolex watch. He was a very demanding supervisor, but most of the men preferred to work for him because he was knowledgeable, fair, honest, and he treated all the workers with respect. He got his boots and hands dirty at every job site.

The power company transitioned from mostly local control and a family environment to a cold corporate structure in just a few years. Middle managers with MBA degrees and engineers were brought into the business structure.  Most of the crew workers were retired, fired for various reasons, or laid off. Now, the local power company operates almost exclusively with contract crews. There are almost no more employed crew members with loyalty to the company. This may look better on a financial spread sheet, but customer service is horrible now. The contract crews truly do not care at all about the work or the reputation of the company.

After retirement, my father in law still got to keep medical, dental, and optometrist insurances. He is paid a very nice pension monthly. He has money in retirement plans, and has millions in power company stock that pays great dividends.

To summarize from our small sample size of 2, both were able to keep their insurance as a non-issue. Both had stock and option benefits. Both had matched retirement accounts.  In turn, both sides of the family have had brand loyalty to their career path employers. Both were proud of the contributions they made to the companies. Both lived stable lives moving very few times while locked into their career path work. Both retired in their communities with dignity and respect. 

Fast forward to my generation of individuals in our 50’s. Both of our parents instilled a strong work ethic into us and were very concerned with character development. We were taught to value education to secure good jobs and opportunities for upward mobility. There was a clear desire for our lives to be even better than our parents. Our parents sacrificed for our activities, college expenses, and to helped us achieve our goals.

  I will forever be eternally grateful to my parents for supporting me through college and grad school. I would have never made it without them! 

I bought a business right out of school. It was a lot of work, many hours, and even more making it up as I went along. I had been told by so many that owning a small closely held business was 24 hour a day job, but I never heard it in a meaningful way! It was truly an “is this how I want to live my life for the next 30 years?” Moment.  

However, the money started to flow, and that made it better for a while. I maxed out retirement plans, and I bought the commercial building that housed the business. I became both a business owner and a real estate investor. It was a great opportunity to really learn accounting, business banking, stock market investing, real estate investing, and tax law. I read, studied, and talked with mentors to grow my knowledge base. I lived with the consequences of my decisions over time. Knowledge and experience lead to wisdom at an early age. I Will always be grateful I did this part of life first. If I was asked at that time what was most important, I would have said the money. Now that I am older,  I am positive the knowledge and experiences that led to wisdom was by far most important.  

After about 5 years as a business owner, the money was just not as exciting anymore. Business equity and investment real estate equity were nicely growing. We were not poor anymore. The business was growing, but my desire to run a small closely held emotionally charged business was not. Privacy was difficult to maintain. Both in my business and in the small town where we lived.

We had to make some decisions. We could grow the business with more staff and more locations or sell the business. By this time, I was sure I did not want more of the stressors that came with owning a small business. I was ready to be done with this high maintenance business ownership and just get a job. And, that is what we did. We sold the business and the real estate. We moved into a big city, and I got a job with benefits! 

At first, it felt like living on vacation. We had the big house, the really expensive cars, cash in the bank. We had a high income, benefits, and paid vacation time. And, we had all the wisdom we gained as business owners. Life was great again for a while!

After the honeymoon period ended… there was creep of the corporate job into our lives. It started with a beeper, then a blackberry, next a laptop, evening and weekend work, and increased on call time. I went from being a stressed out business owner to an abused employee. In other words, the grass was not greener on the employed side.  

Because I had been a business owner, my knowledge, experience, and resulting wisdom about budgets, goals, and compensation packages was much different than others in the company. I was not as easily manipulated, motivated, and responsive to passive aggressive threats. I had a through understanding that numbers are managed while people must be lead. I was less than responsive when other so called leaders tried to manage me. 

I bought and read the textbooks the administrators studied when they achieved their MBA degrees. I learned there was an entire body of literature devoted to manipulating and managing individual human specialist. Often in their discussions, they referred to us as sharpened tools. They have quantified, with elegant research, how many of us lack business understanding and knowledge. And, what triggers, both emotional and scientific, can be used on us to increase productivity or progression to their goals.This powerful education caused me to but heads almost all the administrators because I knew their game better than most of them! I tolerated their game and played along because I did not want to go back to being a business owner, and I knew their game better than most of them. I knew the grass would not likely greener in another employed situation.

The retirement plan options being employed were less than optimal. As a business owner, I had investigated all plans in our market. I chose a discount broker with the bare minimum account maintenance fees, no load funds, low annual fees, and encouraged none of the staff to pay assets under management fees. I had the representative from the firm come out twice a year to educate the staff. Barely 50% of the staff appreciated this, but I had no trouble sleeping at night!

The corporation where I was employed used an insurance company to administer their retirement plan. The match was good at 7%. But the fees were ridiculous. The s and p 500 fund annual expense was 0.50$ while most funds with good discount brokers are 0.01-0.03$; the fee was 50X what I was paying to own the same stocks at the discount brokers. They also required that a portion of the matching money went into an annuity in the retirement account. It had very low returns and high expenses. This part well underperformed the market every year.  These people were executives running a billion dollar business and this is what they chose for both their and the employees plan. I was mind blown! They could sort of run a business, but knew absolutely nothing about personal finance.

I was determined to get out of these investments within their plan. I decided to take a deep dive into the website looking for answers.  And that was when I lost it. On the first page that popped up after logging into the website for the company retirement site was a series of disclosures at the bottom of the page. The first statement read that the onsite and phone support representative were under no obligation to serve as fiduciary advisors. It went on to explain they receive cash bonuses and rewards, like cruse vacations, for selling the investments the company is currently promoting.

I had to go and look up the word fiduciary because I did not know the definition of that word. I Quickly learned that it ment they had no legal obligation to act in the best interest of employees participating in the company retirement plan. My personal paradigm was rocked. My normalcy bias of wanting to believe people are all honest and want to practice the golden rule of treating others as you would treat yourself died that evening.

I printed the page and made 10 copies. I highlighted the disclosures and wrote the definition of fiduciary on it. The next day I taped the papers on the mirrors in many of the men’s bathrooms. It created quite the uproar as people learned the truth about our retirement plan. And, that is how I got to meet several members of the HR team. I had FU money and was over it. When confronted, I bluntly stated that all I did was print the disclosures of the company the executives of this corporation have chosen to administer the retirement plan for all of us. 

After I educated HR team members, I got to meet with a director and a VP of the company. They seriously considered termination of my employment, but told me I was an extremely valuable team member with unique and rare skills. They went on to try to educate me that part of their job was to protect the company. While the information I brought to attention was valuable and required high level review, I was informed I acted very unprofessional. I was told that kind of behavior would not be compatible with continued employment if it happened again. Basically, I embarrassed the executive team, but I was right. I agreed to tone it down because I did really enjoy the work and the fellowship of many of my extremely intelligent coworkers.

A few months later our company made a change in the partner used to manage our retirement plan. I was never informed the change was because of what I did, but I have chosen to tell the story as if that is what happened! 

When I leave my job, I do not get to keep any insurance benefits in regards to medical, dental, or optometry no matter how many years of service. There is no pension. There are pathetic gifts given for milestone anniversaries. There are very limited continuing education funds. Raises are capped at 7% regardless of what internal promotion is rewarded. All human task that can be replaced by AI are happening. The military model is in full effect. If a person has the credentials, they can be moved into any job at any time. Relationships and job experience are not valued. Moral of the employees stays low, and burnout is at all time highs. And, those are just a few of the reasons why focusing on career path work for more than 20 years is not congruent with physical, mental, or personal financial health.

I changed my schedule to 4 10 hour days. I wanted to use the time to explore other options. I dipped my toe in the academic world. I learned about the structure of that world. It was explained to me what the definitions of associate, assistant, professor, and professor Emirates were in a functional way. There were defined benchmarks that had to be achieved as well as time in rank for consideration for promotion. I learned that politics were a critical issue. Others above your level, your colleagues, and your students all got to rate you personally as well as your work performance. And, even if all the benchmarks and politics were in favor of a person, the universities still can only promote limited numbers each year. To state it bluntly, even if a person achieves all the benchmarks and plays the political game well, there is no guarantee of promotion. I learned quickly that the academic world was not a place I wanted to do my years of career path work! There was just too much uncertainty!

 At the end of the first year of being employed, I had a meltdown when I realized how much we were paying in taxes. As business owners, internet, cell phones, travel, half of meals and entertainment , accounting, and legal were all paid with pretax dollars. Working as an employee, almost all of these expenses had to be paid with post tax dollars. This was up something I had knowledge of, had heard many people explain, but did not really hear it until we had to pay. The USA tax code favors business owners much more than employees.

I started a consulting business on the side. I used the side hustle to pre-tax expense many of our bills. I am sure we will have a business as long as we live. The tax laws are just too favorable to business owners vs employees.

One last story to share today. A good friend of mine works for a technology company. He is very close to retirement. The company really values his contribution from his strong knowledge base, 30+ years of experience and the wisdom he has developed over the years. The company has changed his compensation package to include stock and stock options at a premium discount that are awarded at the beginning of each physical year. But, they are only released to him at the conclusion of the physical year. He only gets to keep the stock if he keeps working. Just another example of an evil compensation package created by a heartless HR team that does not care or respect the employee or his contribution to the business. He has to stay one more year to get paid!

After working more than 20+ years and having the privilege of meeting so many amazing individuals, I could write stories about career path work for hundreds of pages. However, I believe enough has been written to efficiently transfer the knowledge. I am going to neatly sum it up in a list of findings and then suggest a plan of action.

Get in to career path work early. Chase promotions, personal growth, and high compensation packages. Keep your mouth shut about your over all plans.  Keep it going for 15-20 years with a clear secret plan that includes an exit strategy. If I had been more focused, I could have been out of career path work at least 5 years sooner!

Max out all deferred compensation plans. Take advantage of all stock options. Live below your means. Deferred investing is much more of a factor than paying off a house or student loans early. Understand that a job or business ownership is not a life sentence. Seasons will change. The question is weather or not you will be ready!

Everybody wants to teach you how to get a high paying job. Almost nobody teaches exit strategies! Internalize that!