A while back, I got assigned to a different supervisor, a guy younger than me who’s dedicated to doing all the “coach” things, including helping me with my career. My first response was, “Dude, I’m 55 years old. How much career development do you expect me to do?” Still, I agreed to think the matter over and see what I might do with the 10-20 years of useful work left in me.

I decided to lay down a couple ground rules for myself:

• I did not want to go back to school to get another degree. Too much time away from Mrs. L and too little room left in the brain.
• I did not want to supervise/manage other people. I can do that, I just really, really don’t enjoy it. Like, ever.

Those choices, plus discussions with my buddy Stuart and  ChatGPT (first time using it for something personally useful, which I’ll discuss another time) gave me a starting point. The options seemed to be:

• Business Analyst
• Engineering Analyst
• Strategic communication

I decided to eliminate StratComm from the list because most of the jobs in that field required talking to the media, and that’s just not my thing.

While I liked the idea of being an engineering analyst, I suspected that I would require more schooling for that. Plus, my experience with engineers has been that they don’t have an immediate level of respect for someone who isn’t another engineer. Meaning I could do all the analysis and produce all the numbers I wanted, but if I didn’t have an engineering degree, I probably wouldn’t be taken seriously. And like I said, I didn’t want to go back to school.

That left business analyst as a potential career. I like spreadsheets more than most English majors, I’m organized, and I have an analytical bent to my personality. I also liked the idea of providing information that would help the company make decisions. Sounded like a winner. I made an appointment with the company coaching person and explained what I was considering doing and asked if that was something the company had a need for. She talked with my manager and HIS manager, and then I spoke with them as well. Indeed, my boss’s boss did have a need for a PP&C guy. Now I just needed to figure out how to educate myself.

The good news about being employed for longer than dirt is that I know a lot of people. As it happened, I had a friend who had been a PP&C (Program Planning and Control) guy on the Ares I-X Flight Test while I was writing papers about it. So I talked with him, and he had me talk with another colleague who’d made the transition from English professor (linguistics, no less!) to PP&C. She indicated that she was functioning just fine and had the spreadsheets doing most of the math, so that wasn’t a major deal. My Ares buddy also sent me a training presentation he used to educate people coming into the field. #winning

This is where I went into research mode, which any tech writer will know well. I absorbed the extensive training presentation, ordered another PP&C book, created an acronym list, and used ChatGPT or other internet resources to explain general topics I didn’t understand and didn’t want to bug the boss with (see? tech writing skills do transfer!). Now that I’m ready to face the new tasks, I am ready to ask more specific, targeted questions that no AI could answer (“How do you want things done?”). Included on that list of questions are these important questions:

• Who do I ask when I have a question?
• Where do I find the information I need?
• Who will be checking my work while I learn and afterward?
• How do we do things differently at our company?
• What outcome(s) are you looking for?

See what I did there? I used my technical writing skills (research, networking) as a way to pole vault myself across a gap of knowledge to a new line of work. That’s often what college professors mean when they talk about “transferable skills” but are at a loss to provide an example. There’s today’s example. More on this as I learn it.