Mid-Career: Challenges & Strategies

Welcome to our second post in the mid-career reflections series. We hope you enjoy and will comment below!

Reflection Questions: What challenges are you currently facing, or anticipate facing, in your mid-career? What advice do you have for others encountering similar challenges? Share strategies for balancing work-life demands and career aspirations during the mid-career stage.

Summer: At this point in my [mid] career, I’d say I’m facing two big challenges.

Re-engaging myself

Just last year I was promoted to Associate Librarian from Assistant Librarian. That process took almost 5 years. 5 years of building up achievements and experience. Now that I have surpassed that milestone, as well as a few others that helped me get that promotion (see previous posts on leading study abroad, chairing BLINC, planning the ELC, etc), I have had to really sit down and think about what direction I want to continue in as it relates to my professional development. I honestly felt that I had done what I wanted to do. I wasn’t sure where to turn. I felt a bit stuck in a rut.

To get out of that rut, a few things worked for me. One was that I took a break from my typical work routine (i.e. I used to teach every semester, but then I took a year off) to finally have time to pay more attention to tasks that I normally push off, don’t get around to and/or when completing give little attention to. I had more time for meetings and discussions that I normally wouldn’t have. This surprisingly brought forth inspiration just from being out of routine as well as gave me the space to be able to really focus and be creative about approaching these tasks that typically I would think aren’t as interesting as teaching. Also, it allowed me to rest mentally in a way that I didn’t expect.

Another strategy that has worked well for re-engaging me is attending conferences or professional development workshops, webinars, book clubs, etc that are not necessarily about librarianship. I know not everyone has this luxury necessarily, but if you can, I promise it is well worth developing the persuasive argument that these experiences will enrich your work. Some recent examples of this in my life would be attending the LILLY Conference, USASBE Social Entrepreneurship Symposium and Techstars’ Founder Con. An on-campus example of this is last summer when I applied to, and was selected for, our Center for Leadership and Character’s Course Design Workshop last summer 2023. In this workshop, my colleague and I were encouraged to develop a library science course that also included concepts of leadership and character to teach within the next year. We created a class that will teach thoughtfulness through business information literacy. That was an out-of-the-box, impactful experience that got me thinking about library science in new ways. All these experiences are relevant to what I do in my work at Wake Forest, and because they’re not solely focused on librarianship, I was able to hear about applications of, and perspectives on, these topics in ways that I wouldn’t normally.

Lastly, surprisingly, making time to experience non-library events on campus has had a larger effect on me than I expected. These events have been selected because they are either something new to me and/or of personal interest, i.e. joining our makerspace’s knitting club. This has encouraged me to get out of my normal silo, and get to know other faculty, staff and students outside the business school and library while pursuing a new skill and/or using my mind in new and/or different ways. I never thought I’d be a knitter, but here I am, knitting my second blanket with a collection of knitted hats!

Work-life balance

It’s humorous to me that I just wrote about knitting when lately, I haven’t even had time to do so. This is due to having had a baby this past October 2023. The new baby brought with it maternity leave and a return to work after leave – both required a huge reorganization of my priorities both personally and professionally. I am glad that I had already started reconsidering what I want to focus on at work prior to the baby because now I have no choice but to be super specific about what I will make progress on, work towards and achieve when I’m at work as the hours are limited!

Having a baby has really forced me to think about what ‘productive,’ ‘successful,’ and ‘enough’ look like for me. To be honest, I’m still figuring it out and experimenting with what feels good and authentic and allows me to be the best mom I can be while still progressing in my career. I think that this is a thinking exercise anyone, even those without a new baby, should think about when entering, or in, their mid-career.

Amanda: To be perfectly honest, while I recently earned tenure after almost six years of teaching, professional research and development, and service at the College of Charleston, the promotion thus far has been pretty lackluster.

Technically, I won’t be a tenured faculty member until the 2024-2025 academic year begins, but so far … Well, I can attest that the malaise, whether of the mid-career or post-tenure variety (or both?), is real, and it may be the biggest challenge that I’m facing right now. So, without complaining too heavily or revealing too much about office politics, in my current state of mind and recent experience, I would say that “mid-career,” for me, means being asked to do more with little increased remuneration or observable respect beyond what I already had, and after over 12 years in libraries (10 of those post-master’s degree), I’m now asking myself all kinds of existential questions about where to navigate my career in the coming years and how to combat my current (hopefully temporary) feelings of disappointment. Since I can’t pay myself more, I’m choosing to focus on self-respect going forward.

Now that you’ve read my bummer opening, here are three things I’m currently doing, or plan to do as this term wraps up, that might be helpful to other folks who are questioning everything about their work in academic libraries as they approach mid-career (and middle age):

1. I’m setting boundaries and priorities. Like, everywhere. And with everyone, including students, faculty and staff colleagues, administrators, even some family members and friends. A lot of this has to do with a renewed dedication to work-life balance via a routine schedule that does not allow work to creep into the time I spend at home with my new husband. [Writing this is how I told my fellow BizLibratory contributors that I got married btw.] I recently deleted all work-related apps from my personal phone, for example, and plan to be very specific about communication outside of class in future syllabi, kindly letting students know that I only read email when I am at work (i.e., during my regular, Monday through Friday schedule). Essentially, I am trying to take the compassion I have poured out for others over the years, especially students, and siphon some of it off for myself.
2. I’m lowering my standards (for myself). This is actually something I preemptively stole from NCFDD’s Faculty Success Program, which I’ll complete this summer. (A friend and colleague completed it last year and shared this nugget of advice when I was simultaneously compiling my tenure packet and teaching FYE for the first time at the beginning of Fall 2024.) Generally speaking, I’m trying to be more realistic about what is possible in an 8-hour day and 40-hour work week and have been slowly developing an underpromise-and-maybe-overdeliver-but-only-if-I-want-to attitude towards work that I’m not especially passionate about. Maybe it took going through an intensely self-reflective tenure process to realize the insanely high expectations I have for myself, but I’m pretty confident these days that my mediocre is comparable to the best on offer from other very successful folks (often white, cisgender men) in academia. I plan to slow my roll a bit post-tenure and take the time to create a meaningful research agenda. I don’t have anything to prove.
3. I’m spending more time on things I am passionate about. While I haven’t really had the time to spare, I’ve been very focused lately (albeit by necessity) on teaching, especially the aforementioned FYE seminar that I teach on AI and algorithmic bias. While credit-bearing instruction (for a class of first-year college students who completed most if not all of high school during a pandemic) can be incredibly frustrating for a whole bunch of reasons, I really do love instructional design and working so closely with undergraduates as an instructor of record. I’m hopeful that being less extra in some areas, as a direct result of setting boundaries as well as lowering unrealistic and/or unsustainable standards for myself, will allow more focus time on instruction and other core areas of my PD (i.e., UX research and design). Bottomline: It feels good to do what you are good at, so I plan to do more of those things.

What mid-career challenges, advice, and/or strategies do you all have?