47: Battling an identity crisis with a career change

Former newspaper reporter Jonathan McFadden opens up about the identity crisis he battled with his career change. He recalls everything he was afraid to lose if he left journalism—would it be worth it? 

“I, like many of us do, conflated my value as a human with my value as an employee,” says Jonathan.

In this episode, Jonathan shares how he tried a couple of different jobs and industries before landing on user experience, also known as UX.

Was it all worth it? Tune in to find out and to hear Jonathan's advice for changing careers more than once. 

Episode Highlights:
• Feeling overworked
• Wanting a better quality of life
• Planning to leave
• Former colleagues look out for each other
• Soft skills are core skills
• Learning the language in a new industry 
• Battling an identity crisis about leaving journalism
• Transitioning to user experience, or UX   
• Feeling aligned with what you’re doing 
• Don’t focus on the job title
• Advice for making multiple career changes 

Additional Episodes:
Ep 31: Leaving journalism: When you need to change industries
Ep 35: Leaving media: Career change for editors

Additional Podcast Mentioned:
What Rules!?: A Career Podcast for Women of Color


Resources:
Where Editors Go Next—An Ongoing List of Pivot-able Industries by Chandra Turner
2024 Editorial Hiring Report by TheTalentFairy

Music credit: TimMoor from Pixabay

Podcast info:
What's your career switch? What do you think about this episode and the show? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lixandra: Hi, everyone. I'm Lixandra Urresta, and this is Career Switch Podcast. This show is here to encourage you to take action with whatever career change you're considering or working on. Maybe you're trying to switch industries or professions or break out on your own and start a business. In some episodes, I talk to people who've made their own career switch, whether by choice or circumstance. They share the good, the bad and the truth about their journey, including what worked for them and what didn't. 

In other episodes, I speak with experts who offer their best career advice on challenges that can come up during the process of making a career change. After all, it takes guts to switch things up, and it's not easy. However, it is possible. So, I hope you hear something in this episode, an idea, a suggestion, a piece of advice that will spur you into action with your own career switch, whether it's taking that first bold step or trying something new. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. 

In 2015, Jonathan McFadden was working for the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. As a young single reporter in his 20s, he was often overworked, covering a variety of stories due to the short staff at the newspaper. He decided it was time to leave, and his career change journey began. In this episode, Jonathan recalls the identity crisis he battled at the idea of leaving journalism. Would it be worth it? 

He also tells us about the multiple career pivots he made before he landed on user experience, also known as UX. Today, Jonathan is a senior content designer at Shopify. He reveals if his career switch was worth it, and he offers advice for changing careers more than once. 

Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for joining us today. Let's dive in. What were you doing before your career switch?

Jonathan: I worked as a full-time newspaper reporter. And for the first two and a half to three years of that foray, I was a crime reporter. So I covered blood and guts. That was my beat. And so after doing that for about two and a half, three years, I switched over to small business and entrepreneurship reporting at the Charlotte Observer, which is the largest newspaper in the Carolinas, in Charlotte, North Carolina. I ran that beat for a little bit before switching over to county government. And then finally, in 2016, I made the move.

Lixandra: And what led up to deciding it was time for a career change?

Jonathan: A couple of things, but I think the predominant factor for me was I just wanted to experience a different quality of life. Being a young or cub reporter, as some would say, in a newsroom that was really trying to remain relevant and keep up with changing readership patterns and the dissemination of news online and the integration of news and social media. It was really tough to have a life outside of my job. I was finding myself kind of going through what I felt like was a bit of a slog. Like I was constantly being bartered around the newsroom, even though I was on the county government beat. I was also still covering breaking news, still covering crime stories, still always the one earmarked and selected for those really occasionally really tough in the moment assignments. I was just tired. I was tired of working on the weekend. I was tired of working over holidays. never feel like I could rest. Like when I'm home, I'm always having to check Twitter because I don't want to get scooped. So it just begins to really get into your personal life. Things I wanted to do outside of work, they were limited. And I just decided, you know what, I'm kind of sick of that.

Lixandra: Were you being sent out to cover so many stories because the paper was short-staffed due to all the layoffs in journalism?

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, during my time there, we probably had at the Charlotte Observer specifically maybe two rounds of buyouts. we lost a lot of really great reporters during that time. And we were absolutely short-staffed. And there were a lot of like internal personnel moves that put a lot of us on alert, people doing like overextending themselves or taxing themselves. And I think I was one of those folks who, again, because of my youth, I was in my mid to late twenties at the time. I was unmarried, didn't have kids. So people's perception of my quote unquote personal life probably was, oh, well, he can do it. What else does he have going on? He doesn't have any responsibilities. He may have things he wants to do, but he doesn't have those types of responsibilities. And so, yeah, I was kind of just one of those people who was just constantly thrown at everything that would come up. And that's exhausting.

Lixandra: Yeah, it sounds exhausting. All right. So when you decided enough is enough, what did you do? Did you do any planning before you left?

Jonathan: Yeah, a little bit. So in the year leading up to my actual move, I had been kind of just putting out feelers here and there, like applying for this or bookmarking this job that seemed really interesting. Nothing too serious or committal up until the latter half of 2015 when I kind of resolved in myself, OK, I really want to try this. I really want to do this thing and see if I can make a pivot, make a change. But I didn't want to do it for any role. I wanted to do it for the right role, because I wasn't interested in taking the more natural or conventional hop that a lot of journalists take, which is you go from being a journalist to being someone in PR or doing media relations for a company. I didn't want to do media relations. I had no interest in being a FLAC or a PIO or a gaggle of reporters hitting me up for the scoop in the organization I worked on. Having been on the other side of that, I knew what that relationship was like, wasn't interested. And so I looked for like some kind of like internal communications type thing or brand journalism type of role. And those were difficult to come by, but also it was hard for me to really penetrate, I think, into those worlds simply because my experience as a journalist was so pervasive. It was of course the most recent thing. Like a lot of companies were looking for people who had done that kind of work before. And it was that age old, you know, dilemma. Well, how can I get the experience if you don't give me the experience? Right.

Lixandra: Right. It's that catch 22. Yep.

Jonathan: It was so frustrating. And so there were moments like my journey had its ebbs and flows as peaks and valleys moments where I was really optimistic about it moments. I was really pessimistic and I was like, okay, maybe I'm just meant to be a journalist. And that's all I'm going to do. And I just need to kind of power through this and push my way forward. But what ended up happening was in December, 2015, January, 2016, a reporter I knew, he had become the director of communications at a mortgage company also based in Charlotte. And he reached out to me on Twitter in a DM asking if I knew of any writers who might be interested in a switch, switch from journalism or just looking for something new. And I was like, well, you know, And so he and I met at a Chick-fil-A for breakfast, and we talked about the role. He explained everything to me, and I told him, listen, I'm trying to get out. This sounds perfect. I would love to do this. Let's make it happen. And I interviewed. I talked to the chief marketing officer. I talked to some other folks on the team. They liked me, and I got the role. And so that's when I started as a communications coordinator at a company called Movement Mortgage.

Lixandra: So it definitely helped that you knew somebody on the inside who could vouch for you, because that's the thing with a career change, right? Like, like you were saying, a lot of companies would rather just go with someone with the experience who's been doing whatever it is that you're applying for, for years. And you basically have to convince the hiring manager that you can do the job with your experience, in your case, as a journalist.

Jonathan: Absolutely. And I think, honestly, I don't know with 100 percent certainty if I would have gotten to do the pivot if it had not been for someone I knew. What I found, especially among former journalists, is that former journalists, when they make a switch, they manage to make the switch and they're looking to hire. They keep an eye out for other former journalists. not just because of the similar backgrounds, but I think it's because of the skill set that you attain and build as a reporter, which requires a lot of versatility, a lot of adaptability, a lot of context switching and context changing, and the ability to distill complicated information into something really simple. People may think of those things as like, oh, yeah, well, everyone should be able to do that. It's a skill. Those are skills. And not everyone possesses those Some people might call them soft skills. I call them core skills. Like those things are foundational and those things have served me well, no matter where I've worked.

Lixandra: Yeah, I'm assuming that's true for all professions where former colleagues look out for each other. That's why networking is so big, right? So, Jonathan, tell us about that first transition when you quit the paper and started your new role at the mortgage company.

Jonathan: So when I first joined Movement, I joined as a communications coordinator and that meant I joined a communications team. And the focus of my role was really centered on building our external storytelling platform. We were really interested in creating a blog because we wanted to tell the Movement story. Something about the company that I really, really liked that appealed to me was that it had a nonprofit arm called the Movement Foundation. And a lot of storytelling I did was for the movement foundation. So I got to tell the stories on the movement blog. I was basically the man, I was the manager of that corporate blog. I worked with the communications team to build our social media presence. I helped with marketing for the opening of what was called the movement school. And so like I got to do a lot of really cool things. But then I also my role pivoted to copywriting as well. So I was doing the brand storytelling thing, but also doing the social media campaign thing, doing the advertising, marketing campaign thing, doing like click ads, display ads, like doing all those kinds of things. I think one of the most interesting things and insightful things that I had to learn coming from journalism was tying my work specifically to KPIs and being able to speak to that impact. As a reporter, that wasn't something I really had to do. It was kind of almost intrinsic, like you write the story, people click on it. I didn't have to show how the words I wrote inextricably resulted in this many clicks or this much revenue. Once I switched over into a more corporate world, I absolutely had to make those connections. I had to understand how to measure my impact. And I would say that was, in my mind, like a really big paradigm shift that I wasn't fully prepared for, but did learn it. Like you learn the language, you learn the acronyms, you learn what all that stuff means.

Lixandra: There's always going to be a learning curve, right? With any career change. So for you, how did you learn to measure your impact? Like you said, did anyone take you under their wing? What about Adam, the former journalist who recruited you?

Jonathan: I feel like it was more, it felt like learning by osmosis. I kind of just absorbed it, kind of just being there and paying attention. You know, I was very invested in learning and understanding the way of the world. Now, Adam was my manager. So in conversations, like he would talk through these concepts and he would teach me a lot, but then there came a time where he wasn't my manager. I had a new supervisor. Like during that time, I was just trying to absorb as much of the information as possible and learn more about this world. I'm one of those people who learns best by doing and observing. So that's kind of what it was. I just absorbed what I heard and saw.

Lixandra: All right. So you've made this transition. It sounds like it went well, but I've got to ask, did you have any regrets about leaving journalism? Just any doubts about the move?

Jonathan: I definitely did. So before I made the transition, once I made it, it was like, oh, this, thank you, Jesus. This is exactly what I needed. But before, oh yeah, I had a huge internal conflict of conscience.

Lixandra: Oh, wow. Let's talk about that.

Jonathan: Well, it was really not a conflict. It was a crisis because I had up until that point just been a reporter. I had been a journalist. That's who I was. That's how people knew me.

Lixandra: And you had studied journalism in school.

Jonathan: Had a degree in journalism.

Lixandra: And you were very active in college?

Jonathan: Very active. I was the news editor of our student newspaper. I had freelance at the local paper while in college. I was part of the mass communication honor society at the university. My name was on a plaque in the department of mass communication because I was voted or named like outstanding leader in mass communication as a senior.

Lixandra: You were like the star pupil.

Jonathan: I was a darling of many of my professors. They didn't give me preferential treatment or anything, but they knew that, OK, Jonathan is more than equipped to do this work. And we are so proud of him. And being a journalist in a community comes with a lot of cachet. It comes with its drawbacks. Don't get me wrong. I got plenty of hate from readers. But also, people come to know who you are. They see your name. They see your byline. And they're like, oh, I like what you're writing. Or you do a great job on this story. And I would get that kind of feedback. With every negative comment, I would also get a lot of positive comments. And then people start sending you news tips. That feels great. And then I was avid churchgoer still at that time. And so people in my church live in the community. And so they would be reading my story Sunday morning. They're like, oh, yeah, I just read this. Oh, my gosh, that's crazy, or that's amazing. So people came to associate me with my identity as a reporter, and I embraced that as a key component of my identity. So when I began to think about leaving journalism, it felt like I was undergoing an identity crisis, because suddenly I'm like, well, who am I if I'm not a journalist? you get really accustomed to being these like the fountain of information for people. And that feels good and it can feel intoxicating in a way. I was like one of the people people knew, right? Like one of the news people in the community people knew. And walking away from that level of notoriety is hard. It's really hard. I know this sounds so prideful and egotistical, but ego was a big part of it. I, again, I'm like, if I don't have a byline anymore, will I slip into irrelevance? Like, no one's going to know who I am. No one's going to care about me anymore. And so that was really hard to wrestle with and grapple with. And what I ended up doing, like, in the couple of weeks before handing in my resignation, or maybe after I resigned from The Observer, my two weeks notice, I went on an apology tour. I messaged former professors. I messaged people. I had been on the Johnsonian that was the student newspaper at Winthrop University, my alma mater. I sent them messages, letting them know what I was doing and apologizing for letting them down. Like I literally front loaded the message with I'm so sorry. I know you believed in me, however. And I was so concerned that I was letting people down, that I was disappointing people.

Lixandra: Oh my gosh, it sounds like this was really eating you up. And how did people respond?

Jonathan: Not a single one of them responded with like, I can't believe you're doing this. Shame on you. You quitter. Everyone was super supportive, reminding me that we love and appreciate you for you, not for what you do. And for me, that was such like a light bulb moment. And it kind of looking back on it, I'm kind of like I chide myself a little bit for even feeling that way. But I give myself grace because, again, I, like many of us do, conflated my value as a human with my value as an employee. And so I'm like, this is who, journalists is who I am. No, journalists is what I did. But who I am is so much more than that. That was a journey for me. It was, it was a journey.

Lixandra: Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, it's definitely something that is instilled in us. I mean, when you meet someone, you usually ask them their name and pretty much the next question is, what do you do, right? So yeah, our identities are tied to what we do for work.

Jonathan: And it's such a powerful and effective invention of capitalism because it keeps us focused on, okay, this is who I am. I have to keep doing it.

Lixandra: Right. And I'll tell you on a personal level, I come from magazines and I loved seeing my name on the masthead. And I'll admit now with podcasting, I love hearing my name in the credits for the other podcasts that I produce. So I totally understand what you're saying.

Jonathan: It's a type of validation.

Lixandra: Yes.

Jonathan: It's like this biological need. We need to know that people see us. It's a survival method. Like, do you see and acknowledge me and see what I'm doing? Okay, cool. Like we're good. We're part of the same group. Cool. You're not going to try and kill me. Excellent. You know, like that's, that helps us. It gives our brains permission to relax a little bit. And I think it translates over into our work too. I've had to switch what validation at work looks like for me because I have a byline. I'm not in a math set anymore.

Lixandra: And funny with copywriting, there's no byline. None. Nobody knows you wrote it.

Jonathan: No one at all. So I think what helped me with that transition was managing the corporate blog. Adam and I agreed that byline should be part of that corporate blog and movement. So I still manage like from 2016 to 2018, I still managed to sneak my byline and some stuff. However, I also started ghostwriting for an executive and that was different because suddenly I'm writing all these things and doing all this stuff, and his name's on it. And that was weird. I'm like, oh, this feels funky. But that was part of the job, building executive presence and building thought leadership among our C-suite. And it was a member of the C-suite. And I wrote, for a while, a weekly blog for him. And every week, I would publish it on the blog. read his name and not mine. And that at first was like, this is weird. But I grew accustomed to it. I didn't hate it.

Lixandra: Yeah, the good news is that eventually we get used to a new way of doing things. All right, Jonathan, let's keep going because your next switch was from copywriting to UX. How did that come about?

Jonathan: In 2018, I started to look for another opportunity. And I came across this job posting at a company called LendingTree. Like I had been, so I had been interviewing at other places before.

Lixandra: And now why were you looking for another opportunity?

Jonathan: So my role at Movement began to change again and it became more PR focused, which when I left journaling, I was like, nah, I'm not doing that. And so I found myself being kind of pushed in that direction. And I'm like, you know what? Let's look for something else. And so I did, I looked for other job opportunities. I interviewed with a few companies, but then I came across this job posting for a content strategist at LendingTree. And so the job listing felt like a mix of copywriting with, I didn't realize it quite at the time yet, user experience. Like it's a fintech company, but there's a product the company builds. I Applied. I had a converse, an initial conversation or phone screening with the hiring manager. We hit it off. I got super excited about the role. I think he got super excited about me. He too had been a journalist at one time.

Lixandra: Wow. Another former journalist.

Jonathan: Yeah, we just really hit it off. And I came in for the in-person interview, went through a little bit of an interview panel and I got really excited about it and managed to convince them that, Hey, this is something I can definitely do.

Lixandra: What got you excited about this role?

Jonathan: I think what appealed to me in addition to the writing stuff, of course, was the opportunity to help shape strategy and to help apply more of my own forward thinking into the things that I worked on. And that's what I found. Like I got the job. I. started off as, I guess you could say, like being more of a conventional copywriter. So email campaigns, landing pages, advertorials, doing all of that. But I also got to work in the actual product, which included the LendingTree app. And then also what we called My LendingTree, which was this log in web experience. I realized that doing that kind of work was its own discipline called content strategy. And that things like microcopy, that was an actual thing. Like that was an artifact that was part of the skill set of being a content strategist slash content designer. And that's when I began to learn more about UX in that world. Like I had heard about UX, of course. I had an idea of what it was, but I had never worked with like UX or UI designers, which is user interface. So I began to work with those people more regularly and learn a lot about what it meant to work in a product and work with product managers and people who are building really this really expansive tool for people to use and get things done. I began to go to conferences, content strategy and content design conferences and meetups and webinars and just met a lot of people, networked like mad. 2019, 2020, especially 2020 because of the pandemic, it was me exploring a new horizon in a way because I just started to get enmeshed in this world of content design and UX and fell in love, fell hard in love. And then I began to try to find ways to make my role more UX specific. Instead of being this hybrid of marketing and UX, I was like, Oh, I want to go all in on the UX stuff. Cause I really, really like this. And my manager to his credit supported that.

Lixandra: What did you fall in love with?

Jonathan: I liked helping people get things done versus selling them on something all the time. I will say that content design and UX work to me felt more in alignment with the things I loved about being a journalist, such as telling people things they need to know. Love that as a reporter. Love that as a UXer. Giving people information and context to make their best decisions. Did that all the time as a reporter. I do that as a UXer. Figuring out how information is structured in a particular interface. Like, that's what I do as a UXer. I did that in stories as a reporter, right? Like, we understand hierarchy. We understand the inverted pyramid. You put the most juicy, most important thing at the top, and you work your way down. Like, the outcome doesn't look the same as a UXer, but the ideas and the philosophy behind that, I use that every single day, all the time, because I am literally structuring information, we call it information architecture. I am structuring information in an experience to help people get through a thing as fast as possible so that they can get to the next thing. So it felt right. It felt like, oh, I'm a journalist again, but different.

Lixandra: Right. Oh, that's so like inspiring. Like, right. You found that same fulfillment that you had when you were a journalist with this new career.

Jonathan: I know reporters right now who kind of grapple with leaving because they're like, well, the stories I write impact so many people and I can like directly affect people's lives and all those kinds of things. Working in a product, you affect millions of people. Your words reach millions of people. They don't know you wrote them. And oftentimes you are not crafting like this beautiful piece of prose. However, you are providing information that helps a person use an app and use it correctly. You are helping a person whether it's order food from a delivery service or it's fill out a health care form or it's set up their own online store. You are actually doing things to help people and you are using language in a lot of ways and some of the most basic foundational skills of a journalist to do those things. It just takes a different form. It just looks different. And yeah, your name's not going to be on it. You got to get over that part. But yeah, it still makes a huge impact in my opinion.

Lixandra: I understand about being of service. I felt that when I worked in women's magazines, I felt someone out there, right, reading this article is being helped. And unfortunately, I did not feel that way when I took a detour with my first career switch to healthcare advertising. I just didn't feel like I was being of service. And that's part of the reason that I left. And now in podcasting, I have it again. I feel Career Switch Podcast and What Rules, the other career podcast that I produce for women of color, I feel that we're helping our listeners. And that feeling is enough, I think, to take that risk with a career change.

Jonathan: I agree. I think you and I are similar in that way. While there was a lot that I loved about being a reporter, my byline, writing for a living, because I don't know what else I do if I don't write. I have a few other skills. Being in the mix and being in the know and being in the news like yes, those things are exciting and great and I loved it. But ultimately, I love to serve. I love to know that my work is doing good in the world, that my words are doing good in the world. Like that to me makes the career transition worth it.

Lixandra: And I don't regret it at all. Love that. So Jonathan, where are you today?

Jonathan: Today, I am a senior content designer at Shopify. Shopify is a major e-commerce company and I work specifically for a line of business called the Shop app. And what I do is specifically currently I work for what's called the shop store. And the shop store is the quote unquote back end where entrepreneurs can manage their presence brand and products on the shop app. So my work directly helps merchants basically make their best showing on the shop app so that they can make money.

Lixandra: So now you're serving merchants. Yep. That's who you're helping.

Jonathan: That's when I'm helping, exactly. Entrepreneurs, which also kind of speaks back to my journalism experience when I was a small business reporter, right? So I have like a certain affinity for entrepreneurs. I know many of them personally. So I have some like emotional connection to that as well.

Lixandra: What do you do as a content designer?

Jonathan: For those who don't know what content design is, like a really popular explanation is that it's designing with words. So if you're familiar with the interface of an app, for instance, Imagine taking all the words out of the app. How do you use it? So content designers are responsible for really developing the language that help people like you and me use those particular digital products to accomplish certain tasks. But my job isn't just about writing, like there's a lot of research involved. There are things like taxonomy, which is the classification of things using language. There's a content hierarchy. Like I was thinking about how information is structured from most important to least important. And now my role actually within the last three months has changed a little bit where I'm doing more. product design work as well. So I'm not just responsible for the language. I'm responsible for the actual interface. I'm responsible for every visual. I'm responsible for the interaction design. And so while it is a lot, a larger scope than I thought I'd ever work in. And I never thought I'd do something like this. I do see a lot of value in it. Like I think it helps people use Like in this ever increasing digital world, it helps people navigate digital communities in a way that feels reasonable and responsible. Like that's what I aim to do. So yeah, like it's, it's great. Like, I love it.

Lixandra: Well, so happy it worked out for you. Jonathan, what advice do you have for our listeners who are working on their career switch?

Jonathan: I would say tip number one is to distill what you love about your current role into skill sets, not job titles. I think a lot of times when people are making a switch, they look for a specific title that will give more indication about what they are liable to do in that role. So for instance, you may look for media relations. You may think that, OK, I'm a journalist. The only thing I can do is something that has media in it or has some kind of PR in it or has writer in it. I would say don't get distracted by those titles because ultimately, Job titles don't mean much of anything. They are a way for the business to classify you. It's how the business relates to you. But it doesn't necessarily speak to your role or even the skills you'll need to do the job. So I would say, think about the things in your current career, in your current job. Boil those down to the skill sets that you employ and the skills you want to continue to sharpen and grow. Let that guide you, not the title.

Lixandra: Interesting, because I noticed that the first job you took when you left the paper was communications coordinator. Yeah. And my first thought was, isn't that entry level? Coordinator tends to be an entry level title in many industries. Yeah. But to your point, don't focus on the title, right? Focus on the duties you'll be doing.

Jonathan: Exactly, because coordinator at a lot of companies is entry level. Absolutely. And that was something I was like, ooh, do I want to do that? Am I stepping back in a way, like, kind of down leveling myself, but then I focus more on what I was actually doing, which isn't coordinator type work like managing a corporate blog does not for a coordinator make right so. Eventually my title did change to copywriter, which was more in alignment with what I was doing and felt like a reasonable reflection of my scale and impact of work. But yeah, it's like, don't, don't let the titles get in the way. Focus on the core skills that you'll have to employ and the things you enjoy about your job. So find those things in the job description and in conversations with hiring managers and companies, like make sure you're hearing those words, not the title.

Lixandra: Got it. So Jonathan, a lot of our guests on Career Switch podcast have made one career change, but I think you're in a unique position to give our listeners advice on making more than one career switch like you have.

Jonathan: I've made in a short, relatively short amount of time, a couple of different pivots. Like I've been like all over the place, right? Understand that like if you're about to make a career switch and it's your first one, it may not be your last, right? You may make a switch, and you're like, five years later, you're like, you know what? I'm feeling the urge for another change, a new stimulus yet again. That is OK. The way we are thought, indoctrinated, is that you need to find one thing to do, and that's what you stick with all your life. I think maybe in former generations, not to make a sweeping generalization, But it may have been a lot more common to do that. Like you hear stories of people are like, yeah, my grandfather was a lumberjack all his life. And maybe that worked for him because times were different and maybe there was more stability and more certainty. A pension, for instance. Nowadays, things aren't like that. You know, pensions are gone for the most part. 401ks are also not as great as they used to be. Right. So it's like. Be willing to embrace the fact that your career journey is a long one for the most part. And it's not going to always look the same. It's not going to fit a mold. So it's OK to change your mind. It's OK to start in something and be like, oh, you know what? I actually don't like this, and to pivot to something completely different. A lot of times, I think we punish ourselves and maybe even judge other people for job hopping and making those kinds of changes. But it's your career. Own it, embrace it, and know that change, not only is it OK, it's inevitable. It's going to happen. I love UX right now. I don't see myself doing something else anytime soon. But I might. And I need to be open to that. And it's OK if I do.

Lixandra: Right, because I know you're about to have your first child when we're recording this. Yes. So who knows, right? You may have to make some changes when you have a growing family. Absolutely. I have to roll with it. Your needs might change. You never know.

Jonathan: You never know, and it's OK not to know. And then once you find yourself at the crossroads of a decision, it's OK to take the road that leads to uncertain change, because it might be a beautiful thing awaiting you down that path.

Lixandra: Thanks to Jonathan McFadden for being our guest today. If you want more advice on how to lead journalism, check out episode 31 with former magazine editor Maria Azua, who switched to SEO, and episode 35 with Chandra Turner, a former editor-in-chief who now helps editorial professionals switch industries. 

You can find links to the resources mentioned in this episode and more helpful information in the show notes and on our website, careerswitchpod.com. So what's your career switch? Are you motivated to take action after listening to this episode? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. We'd love to know, along with any feedback you have about the show. Let us know too, if you'd like to be a guest. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at careerswitchpod. And please rate, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. It'll help get the show out there. Thanks for listening today. Till next time.