Career Change to Electrician at 40

You were an office manager for 16 years. Why leave?

I was good at it. That was part of the problem. I was so good at it that the job stopped growing. By year 12, I could run the office with my eyes closed. Ordering supplies, managing the calendar for 30 attorneys, dealing with the building management company, handling new-hire onboarding. I could do all of it and none of it challenged me. I was earning $54,000, which in Minneapolis is fine but not exciting. My raises were 2% a year. My ceiling was maybe $58,000 if I stayed another decade. And every morning I'd sit in my car in the parking ramp for a minute before going in and think, is this it? For the next 25 years? Because the answer was yes. If I stayed, this was it.

My brother-in-law Hollis is an electrician. He's been in the IBEW for 20 years. I'd watch him at family dinners and he'd talk about his work with this energy that I didn't have about mine. Not excitement exactly. More like, I don't know, engagement? He was solving problems. He was building things. He'd come in tired and dirty and he'd talk about running a 200-amp feed through a parking garage and his eyes would light up. I mentioned once that I was thinking about a change and he said, "you should look at the trades." He didn't push it. He just said it once. I thought about it for eight months. Then I applied.

What was the application process like?

I applied to a state-registered apprenticeship program through a contractor that does commercial work. The interview was me, three guys in their early twenties, and a woman who was 28. I was 41. The interviewer, a man named Roy, asked me why I wanted to do this at my age. And I appreciated the directness because I'd been asking myself the same thing. I told him I was tired of managing other people's calendars and I wanted to build something. He nodded and said, "The work is physical. Are you prepared for that?" I said yes because I thought I was. I was not fully prepared for that.

What was year one like?

Humbling. I'm 41 years old, I have a mortgage, I have a 13-year-old son named Emil, and I'm making $18 an hour as a first-year apprentice. My law firm salary was $54,000. My apprentice salary was about $37,400. That's a $16,600 pay cut. My husband Lars works in insurance underwriting, makes about $67,000, and between us we were making $121,000 before I switched. We dropped to about $104,000. We didn't go hungry. But we stopped eating out. We canceled the gym membership. We told Emil that his birthday party would be at the house this year instead of the trampoline park. He was fine with it. Kids are more adaptable than adults give them credit for.

The physical part was the hardest adjustment. I went from sitting at a desk for eight hours to climbing ladders, carrying bundles of conduit, crawling through ceilings, and bending over for extended periods. My knees started complaining in week three. By month two, I had a standing appointment with a physical therapist. Dr. Peterman told me my knees were fine, there was nothing structurally wrong, but the muscles around them hadn't been used this way in 20 years and they needed time to adapt. She gave me exercises. I do them every morning now, 15 minutes before I leave for work. The knees still talk to me. But we've negotiated a truce.

How did you adjust to being the oldest apprentice on the crew?

It's weird. I won't pretend it isn't. My journeyman Piotr is 33. He's 12 years younger than me and he's my boss. He tells me what to do and I do it. That requires an ego adjustment that I don't think everyone can make. Some people, they can't take direction from someone younger. I could, because I'd spent 16 years taking direction from attorneys who were often wrong and rarely admitted it. Taking direction from Piotr, who is right about 95% of the time and admits the other 5%, is easy by comparison.

The young apprentices were uncertain about me at first. They'd look at me and I could see them thinking, why is this lady here? But office management teaches you one thing really well: how to be useful to people quickly. Within two weeks, I was the person who kept the gang box organized. I labeled every drawer. I made a tool checklist for the end of the day. The guys started coming to me when they couldn't find things. Piotr noticed and he said, "You're the most organized apprentice I've ever had." I told him I spent 16 years managing attorneys. Conduit is easier. He laughed. We've been fine since then.

What do you bring from office management that actually helps?

Sequencing. A law firm office manager lives and dies by sequencing. The documents have to be filed before the deadline, the conference room has to be booked before the meeting, the supplies have to be ordered before they run out. Every task has dependencies. Electrical work is the same. You can't pull wire before the conduit is installed. You can't install conduit before the boxes are mounted. You can't mount boxes before the layout is marked. The sequence matters and if you get it wrong, you're ripping out work. I understood that instinctively because it's the same logic as running an office. Different materials, same brain.

What I didn't bring was spatial awareness. At the office, I worked in two dimensions. Paper, screens, flat surfaces. Electrical work is three-dimensional. The conduit goes up, over, around, through. I had to learn to see in 3D, to look at a blueprint and picture the conduit routing through a ceiling that I can't see yet because the drywall isn't up. That took me about a year to get comfortable with. Piotr says I'm good at it now. I think I'm adequate. But I notice that the guys who started at 18 have a spatial intuition that I'm still building. Their bodies learned the space before their brains had to think about it. I'm doing it the other way around, brain first, body following. It works. It's just different.

What's yours?

The respect gap. When I was an office manager, I was the person people came to. I solved problems. I managed the building, the supplies, the calendar, the vendors. I was the hub. People said good morning to me and meant it because I was the person who made their day work. Now I'm a fourth-year apprentice. I'm good at what I do. But I'm not the hub. I'm the person who carries conduit and bends offsets and sweeps up at the end of the day. The work has more meaning to me than office management ever did. But the social position is lower. I went from being essential to being junior. At 45.

Lars asked me once if that bothers me. I told him it does, a little, but that I'd rather be junior at something I care about than essential at something I don't. That's the trade I made. It's a real trade. Nobody talks about the identity piece of a career change at 40. They talk about the money, the physical challenge, the learning curve. They don't talk about the fact that you go from being a known quantity to being nobody. That part is harder than the knees.

You taught history for 14 years. What made you leave?

The pay and the politics, and I'm not sure which one was worse. I was making $52,000 after 14 years. In Henrico County, that's, I mean, it's livable but it's not comfortable. My wife Patrice is a dental hygienist, she makes about $68,000. Between us we were at $120,000 household income, which sounds fine until you factor in that I was working 55-hour weeks when you include grading, lesson planning, coaching JV baseball, and the three nights a week I'd stay until 6 PM for tutoring and parent conferences.

And the politics. I taught AP US History, which I loved. The content, the debates, the students who got excited about primary sources. But every year, there were more directives about how to teach and what to say and how to frame things, and fewer resources to actually do it. The school board meetings got worse. Parents started showing up to complain about things I'd been teaching for a decade without issue. I had a parent tell me that my unit on the Progressive Era was "politically biased." The Progressive Era. We're talking about Teddy Roosevelt and food safety laws. I smiled, said I'd review the materials, and went home and told Patrice I couldn't do this for another 14 years.

Why electrical specifically?

My neighbor Ray, he's a retired electrician, IBEW for 35 years. He and I would talk over the fence and I'd ask him about the trade. He explained the apprenticeship, the pay scale, the pension, the benefits. The math was what got me. A union journeyman in Richmond makes about $34 on the check. That's $70,700 a year on 2,080 hours. Plus pension, health insurance, annuity. My teacher salary after 14 years was $52,000 with a pension that required 30 years of service for full benefits. I'd done 14. I'd need 16 more. The IBEW pension vests after 5 years. By the time I'm a journeyman at 46, I'll have 4 years in. One more year and I'm vested. The math was better. Not by a lot in the short term, but in the long run, much better.

The apprentice interview was interesting. The committee asked me why a 42-year-old teacher wanted to become an electrician. I told them I was tired of explaining to school boards why Teddy Roosevelt matters and I wanted to do something where the results were measurable. I wire a panel, I test it, it works or it doesn't. Nobody calls a meeting to debate whether the panel is biased. They laughed. I meant it.

What was the financial transition like?

Brutal. My first-year apprentice rate was $17.50. That's $36,400 a year. I went from $52,000 to $36,400. That's a $15,600 drop. We had savings, about $22,000, and Patrice's income kept the lights on, literally and figuratively. But we went from two comfortable incomes to one comfortable income and one survival income. The first year was tight. We refinanced the house to lower the monthly payment by $300. We stopped contributing to our IRAs. We told our daughter Brooke, she was 16 at the time, that her car was going to be the Camry we already had, not a newer one.

Year two was better. My rate went to $21. Year three, now, I'm at $26. Next year I'll be at about $30, and when I get my journeyman card at the end of year four, I'll be at the full scale, which is currently $34.12. That's $71,000 gross. More than I made teaching. With a pension. And health insurance that Patrice and I won't have to think about. The first year was an investment. A painful investment. But the curve is steep. You just have to survive year one.

You mentioned teaching shaped how you experience the work. How?

Teaching is, at its core, about explaining complicated things to people who don't want to listen. I did that for 14 years. Five classes a day, 30 students per class, most of them checking their phones under the desk. You learn to read a room. You learn to adjust your explanation when someone's eyes glaze over. You learn to break a complex idea into steps.

That translates directly. When my foreman Sully explains a new procedure, I process it the way I used to process curriculum. What's the objective? What are the steps? What's the sequence? What's the likely point of confusion? I take notes. Actual notes. In a notebook. Sully noticed in week two and said, "First time I've seen an apprentice take notes." The young guys absorb it by doing. They watch, they try, they get corrected, they try again. I write it down, study the note later, and get it right the first time more often. Not always. But more often. Teaching taught me that learning is a process you can optimize if you're deliberate about it.

The other thing teaching gave me is patience with being corrected. Students corrected me all the time. "Mr. Clyde, you said 1917 but the test says 1918." And I'd say, "You're right, thank you." Fourteen years of that means I can stand in front of Sully and hear "that's wrong, redo it" without my ego catching fire. Some of the younger apprentices struggle with that. They take correction personally. I take it as information. That's a teacher's habit and it's served me well in the trades.

What about the physical side?

I was a JV baseball coach for 10 years, so I wasn't completely sedentary. But coaching is not the same as construction. Year one, I lost 14 pounds without trying. My back hurt for the first three months. My hands blistered, then calloused, then blistered again. I developed what my doctor called "electrician's elbow," which is like tennis elbow but from pulling wire and twisting connectors. She prescribed rest. I laughed. She prescribed ibuprofen. I took the ibuprofen.

The knees are the thing. I'm 45 and I'm climbing ladders all day. Going up is fine. Coming down is where the knees protest. I bought the most expensive kneepads I could find, Proknee pads that strap on like shin guards. They cost $95. Best $95 I've ever spent. Sully's been in the trade for 28 years and his advice was: "Invest in your knees now or pay for them later. There's no third option." I believed him immediately because I could see the way he moves. Carefully. Like a man negotiating with his own body.

What's yours?

The identity thing. When I was a teacher, I could tell anyone what I did and they understood immediately. "I teach history at a high school." People nod. They have opinions about teachers. They respect the idea of it, even if they don't respect the pay. Now I tell people I'm a third-year electrical apprentice and I get this pause. "At your age?" Not always said aloud. But I can see the thought. A 45-year-old apprentice. It sounds like a step backward.

Brooke had a friend over last month and the friend asked what I do. Brooke said "he's an electrician." Not "he's an apprentice." She upgraded my title. I don't think she was embarrassed. I think she just, she didn't want to explain the whole story. And honestly, neither do I most of the time. "I'm an electrician" is simpler than "I taught history for 14 years and then I decided at 42 that I wanted to do something with my hands and now I'm three years into a four-year program and I make less than I used to but I can see the light at the end of the conduit, if you'll pardon the pun."

But here's the thing I didn't expect. I think about the Hoover Dam book I'm reading right now. Those electricians in 1935, they wired generators that still work. Ninety years later. The electricity still flows. Nothing I taught in a classroom will last 90 years. A student might remember something from my class, maybe. But the wire I pulled last week at the hospital renovation in Shockoe Bottom, that wire is going to carry electricity for decades. There's a permanence to this work that teaching didn't have. I didn't realize I wanted that until I felt it.