The Job Had Not Changed. He Had. My Husband’s Story.

I joke with my Career and Life Planning students that my husband is my greatest career counseling success story.

What do you expect, I tell them, when you marry someone who teaches what I teach?

But that is not really true. Fred created his own success. I just had a front-row seat and played only a small supporting role.

Here is his story. With his permission.

As a child it was clear that he was smart, probably “gifted” in the formal school classification sense. His fifth grade teacher pushed to have him skip sixth grade. His academic abilities continued to shine. And he wanted to go to college. He had the desire. What he did not have was anyone who could show him how to make that happen, or the money to figure it out on his own.

By sixteen he had moved out and was supporting himself on a Sears sales salary. College stayed in the back of his mind. It just stayed there.

His dream was to be a sports broadcaster. After high school graduation he enrolled at the local community college and tried to pursue it while balancing work and classes. But entry-level courses are hard to stay motivated through when they do not feel relevant, you are paying for them yourself, and you are simultaneously being told you have a real future in retail management.

Eventually, he stopped enrolling in college classes.

Sears had noticed his talent. He was on a management track he was genuinely excited about. And then one of his employees, a woman who worked on his team, changed everything.

She invited him to dinner. She asked him about his college and career plans. He told her about the Sears management track.

She listened. Then she told him that Sears was a good job. But what he needed was a career.

Her husband worked at BNSF Railway. They were hiring. She handed Fred an application and told him to put her husband down as a reference.

He did. And before long, he was a railroad conductor.

He kept his Sears job through the four-week paid training program. He did not want to burn that bridge if the railroad thing did not work out. But once those railroad paychecks started coming in, he understood exactly what that woman had been trying to tell him. He quit Sears and committed to the railroad.

Then came a child, unexpected and absolutely cherished. The pay, the benefits, the stability provided for that child in a way Fred himself had never been provided for. That meant everything to him.

So he stayed.

And then, like so many people caught in the current of life, he could not leave. The cost and time of starting over into something he actually chose, rather than something that had simply evolved, was no longer a realistic option.

I met Fred at work when he was nearly ten years into his railroad career.

I assumed he loved it. I mean, why else would someone still be there after ten years? Surely a person does not spend that long doing something they hate.

I was so wrong.

As we got to know each other, I learned the truth he was not concealing particularly well. He had enjoyed the early years. Being a conductor, then an engineer, was a puzzle to solve, a skill to master. But once he had mastered it, the challenge was gone. What remained was the repetition. Drive the train. Move things from here to there. Come back tomorrow and do it again. In all the years stretching out ahead of him, it would be the exact same thing.

The job had not changed. He had.

So I asked him what he would do if he had the choice.

He told me about a BNSF training center in Kansas. He had been there to earn his engineer promotion. And when he sat in those classrooms and watched the instructors, something clicked. That, he told me, was what he wanted to do.

I told him to do it.

He gave me a sheepish smile. He wanted to, I could clearly see that. But it felt like a dream, not a real possibility. His son was settled in his school. He had lived in the same area his entire life, with deep roots and real community. He had no desire to leave, not even for a different job.

So he stayed. His frustrations quietly grew, getting louder every year. I kept telling him he had options. He took what short-term assignments were available. But the reality was clear. As long as we stayed where we lived, there would never be a real opportunity for something different within the company.

I kept encouraging him anyway. Because I could see how he was growing, even when he did not think any of it mattered.

Here is what finally pushed him to make a change and take a chance.

The commute.

By this point he had been with the railroad for nearly twenty-five years. And he had finally hit a wall. Forty-one miles each way. San Francisco Bay Area traffic. A toll bridge. Something had to change.

A position opened at the Kansas training center. He applied. And I will be honest, I was shocked when he actually took it.

That was six years ago.

Today, Fred is a Manager of Field Training, still at BNSF Railway, working in the exact building where years before he had that epiphany about what he wanted to do with his career. He is a teacher. A mentor. A leader. And here is the thing. He always was those things. Sears saw it when he was just a teenager. It just took him a long time to find the place, at the company he was already at, where those strengths could actually be used.

Is the job perfect? No. No job is. But he is satisfied and fulfilled in a way he simply was not for most of his railroad career. And he got to keep what mattered most to him. Taking care of his family.

I have no doubt Fred would have been an amazing sports broadcaster. He has the voice, the personality, and the instincts for it. The man is a walking encyclopedia of sports knowledge and facts. It is also an extraordinarily competitive field where even the most talented people do not break through. Whether he would have been one of them, nobody can say. But here is what I know. I think it would have fit him for exactly the same reason his current role does. At his core, Fred is a teacher. Broadcasters are teachers too. They take something complicated, a game, a moment, a season, and they help an audience understand and feel it. Fred would have been excellent at that.

What he built on an alternate route, the path that wound through a Sears sales floor, across countless miles of railroad tracks, and eventually to a training center in Kansas, is pretty amazing too.

In Career Compass: A Guide to Career Exploration, I walk readers through the foundational work of knowing yourself. Your strengths, the things that come naturally and energize rather than drain you. Your interests, the work that pulls your attention. Your values, the principles that make a career feel meaningful. Your goals, the honest vision of the life you are trying to build. That foundational work is where career exploration begins.

But it is only where it begins.

Career Compass also spends significant time on what I call Additional Considerations. The circumstances of your actual life. Your financial reality. Your family obligations. Your geographic constraints. Your phase of life. The people whose lives are woven into yours. These are not afterthoughts to the process. They are part of it. And for many people, they are where the real navigation happens.

Fred’s story did not start with strengths, interests, values, and goals. It started with survival. His Additional Considerations came first. The foundational work came later. That is not unusual.

But his career today reflects all of it. The whole framework. Just on his unique timeline.

That is the thing about career exploration. It is rarely linear. It rarely happens at the right time or in the right order. But it is never too late, and the work of knowing yourself is always worth doing.

Even if it takes twenty-five years and a really bad commute to get there.