Starting over ... again

My career as Professor, Interactive Multimedia, at the College where I had been employed for over 20 years, ended with my retirement in early 2019. Two days later, I notified my Content Manager at LinkedIn that I had retired. The next day my retirement status morphed from “Retired” to “Post Employed.”

How I became “retired” is an interesting story. Having been deeply involved in teaching Interactive Media for well over 30 years, writing books and articles about the subject for the same period, and speaking at conferences and seminars around the world, I was quite aware of the fact I was usually the oldest guy in the speaker lineup, leading the seminar or in the faculty office.  This never bothered me because I firmly believe you are valued for what you know, not what you are which was a view shared by my industry peers and faculty.

This all changed a couple of years before I left. As faculty “old-timers” are wont to do, there was a group of us from a variety of the departments under our “School’s” umbrella, who would regularly swap stories and generally chat about what we were up to. It was during one of these sessions, we became acutely aware we were being subtly marginalized. This was also when I started to discover ageism is easily recognized when one experiences it but impossible to prove.

I hit the inevitable point where “resistance is futile” and, in January 2019, negotiated an amicable exit. In retrospect, I should have done it earlier because my status change from “retired” to “post-employed” may have happened sooner.

Before I get into how I became post employed, I should add a disclaimer. I can’t presume to speak for others, so you need to clearly understand this is my story and you are free to take from it what you may.

So I am going to start by saying quite bluntly: “I am a teacher.”

I have always regarded that role as being “imparting knowledge”. To do that credibly, a teacher has to be willing to learn and, in my subject area- Digital Media- where radical change is a constant, one has to be willing to embrace change if one is to be credible. It’s that simple. Yet there is a common perception that, as one gets older, one tends to resist change. This is patently false but does factor into ageism.

Since 1998 I have written 18 books for five publishers, written thousands of tutorials, done Digital Media lecture tours throughout China, the U.S., and Europe, spoken at dozens of conferences, and produced over 25 video courses since 2007 for Lynda.com, LinkedIn Learning, Envato and video2brain. This was how I managed to stay current and embrace change. This was also how I managed to keep my students current with the industry. I would take what I learned from those courses and the people I had met on my travels and take it right into my classrooms. My Dean once asked me why I do this, and my reply was a question: “Are we preparing our students for employment or unemployment?”

Frankly, I planned to retire when I hit 70. I felt this would buy me the time to figure out what to do next. My fear was I would be doing nothing which terrified me. I am a teacher and I dreaded the prospect of just walking away and letting my skill’s atrophy. This brings us to my current “post-employment” status.

A couple of years before my retirement I kept stumbling across this term - “UX”- and some of the tools and emerging best practices associated with this term. I realized this was one of those “radical changes” that was looming on the horizon and started digging into it by learning to use the tools used to create prototypes. The other aspect of UX that caught my attention was there was a lot of work done before the software was flamed up. There was an entire team-based process and workflow development that my students were unaware of but needed to know. So I dug in.

In the middle of all of this, my Content Manager at LinkedIn Learning asked if I had any ideas for new courses. We agreed on a UX Design course and that is how I found myself regularly developing courses in the UX Design area of LinkedIn Learning. To me, it was a Win/Win. I could deeply explore UX Design and my students would learn about this emerging field and where they fit in. Best of all, they were being prepared for employment. What I didn’t know was that I was also preparing for post-employment.

Since retiring I have developed seven UX Design courses and, as I write this, a couple more are in the discussion phase. The bottom line is, my teaching skills are still in play and are being used in a different classroom… one without four walls. Best of all, without the administrative demands of an educational institution, I am not only free to fuel my teaching passion but I also have the time to explore other areas such as photography, design software tools, and video at my own pace… not because I have to but because I want to.

So what’s the “take away”? Retirement is not the end of your usefulness to society. What it does is free up the time to follow your passion and to keep yourself intellectually engaged with the world around you. My post-employment experience does just that for me and I hope, in some small way, my story sparks something in you as you, too, are contemplating retirement.