1. Education and small business jobs - 1984-1994
2. US West New Vector/Airtouch/Vodaphone/Verizon Wireless - 1994-2003
3. T-Mobile - 2004-2011
4. Starbucks - 2011-present
1. Education and small business jobs - 1984-1994
Bouncing back and forth between attempting to get a four-year degree and working for small businesses, I learned a lot about who I am and what I'm good at, basically what raw materials I have that could be developed into something, and what business and academia are all about. I had the opportunity to work for several small businesses that were vendors and customers to each other.
In small business, you get to see all the different parts of a business. Each company had its own core competency, but the basic business functions were the same for all of them. Working for interrelated businesses was a great course in economics - your cost is my revenue - and in how the customer/vendor dynamics play out - customer is king versus the interests of my own business. Bouncing back and forth between academia and business, I could see how skills and knowledge, training and education, research and application balanced each other. (Oddly enough, though, I never made that connection in mathematics. It wasn't until 25 years later that I started to wish I'd not stuck my knows up at applied maths in favor of the more "pure" abstract theories.)
I don't really remember there being any cost to any of this. Isn't that the way of the young, all that energy expended is free. I was struggling with mental health at the time, but that was a preexisting condition and it improved throughout this period.
2. US West New Vector Group/Airtouch/Vodaphone/Verizon Wireless - 1994-2003
When I started at NVG, I had never spent more than 13 months at any job. Prior to this, that had been a bit of a liability because it was not the norm. Hoping around was seen as a shallow resume. The mid-1990's, though, were the era where business discovered that the world was changing faster than corporations could adapt and they started looking for employees with broad experience rather than deep. Suddenly my experience was a rare and precious asset. I was also lucky enough to be in a support department that had visibility to Finance, Marketing, IT, Sales, etc. and I got to see how all the essentials of business that I had learned with small companies scaled up into Corporate America.
I also learned that IT is very different from "being the tech kid"; Finance is very different from "being the bookkeeper"; Sales and Marketing are very different from "being the sales person"; Management is very different from being "the owner". I had to work as a team, be a cog where I couldn't see the whole machine, trust in others. Being bright wasn't enough. It wasn't even all that important.
I had to grow up. This had big emotional costs.
This period took my raw material potential and fashioned a career. Economically, we moved into the middle class. We had health care benefits for the first time, vacations, bought a house. I participated in professional organizations, started building a reputation. These were the things bought with the mental and emotional energy expended.
3. T-Mobile - 2004-2011
I started T-Mobile mentally and emotionally tired. These reserves quickly recovered as for the first time I had actual credibility. I was 38 and an established professional coming into the company as a lead. T-Mobile gave me responsibility, empowered me to take a lot of rope and run with it, held me accountable for results instead of task velocity. I learned that I could take my skills into new situations and quickly establish myself as a professional in a new area. I developed competency and reputation for a rare skill set. I directed people in three time zones around the world, managed people I've never met in person. Incredible opportunities!
My family paid for those opportunities. Paid dearly.
Within a year into my tenure at T-Mobile, stress had damaged my health and started my "career" as a health care recipient. By the end of my time there, I was spending every summer out on medical leave. All of my vacation and sick time was spent trying to rest enough to continue working. My long term ability to work was seriously in question, making our family finances somewhat precarious. (I was the only wage earner.)
My daughter spent her adolescence where all of her needs were secondary to my health and work. The toll to her mental and emotional health was severe. My husband lost the grip he'd had on sobriety since right before we'd become engaged to wed - not directly because of the impacts of my career, but not unrelated, either, and that compounded our daughter's issues.
At least I came out of T-Mobile mentally and emotionally very strong and robust.
4. Starbucks - 2011-present
Starbucks is the kind of place that finds and recruits good people and turns them loose to provide value for Starbucks. They'll tell you the vision, values, and high-level goals and empower you to figure out what needs to be done and how. It's a somewhat chaotic place to work, but not even the sky can limit you.
Starbucks recruited me for my strengths in an area they were weak. They didn't tell me what my job was, they brought me in, oriented me to my context, and asked me to do whatever they needed. They didn't even know what that was, but trusted me to.
My physical health is recovering quite rapidly (despite the setback of being hit be a car about a year in). I am able to support our daughter as she establishes her own life and starts discovering her raw materials. My husband has the luxury to follow his calling to study math and support disabled students, adults trying to complete basic high school material, at risk youths, special needs students who have challenges the average peer student doesn't understand. We are thriving and reaping the rewards we all sacrificed for while I was at T-Mobile.
It's too early to tell what the cost will be. Probably mental energy.
