Mama Bee, a blog for working moms, has a post today titled Career Change a Luxury for Most Working Parents. WordPress was good enough to alert me to it, because she linked to my recent post on letting the economy nudge you into chasing your dreams.
Mama Bee makes some good points about how many challenges people might encounter if they want to make a career switch: what about health care? how about child care? the economics of going back to school?
She opines on a New York Times article about people’s career dreams, writing:

… the article mentions a corporate lawyer who quit his law job to pursue a career in personal training, which he parlayed into a successful fitness and yoga center business.  It also talks about a woman who left her job in pharmaceutical sales to start a design business.  
What if one of these two entrepreneurs had a family?  They would have had to worry about maintaining health insurance; making enough money to cover basic expenses like food, housing and school supplies; and childcare.  With these economic pressures, going back to school, shifting careers, or starting a new business feels impossible for many people.  And that’s a much bigger problem for our economy at large, because right now we need people to jump at the opportunity to innovate, not recoil because it puts their children at risk.
As companies determine where to economize, jobs will be lost to changing technology and the shifting geography of manufacturing.  For employees in industries that are being eliminated — paper-based transactions or many kinds of manufacturing for example — changing careers is not just about being happier; it’s critical to their ability to continue participating in the workforce at all.  We need to start talking about making innovative career shifts possible for the thousands of people who currently work in jobs that are increasingly less relevant to the US economy.

It’s absolutely true that making a change is hard. Health care can be the golden handcuffs that keep many an unhappy soul shackled to an unfulfilling job. If you’ve got a family to provide for, waiting three or five years to turn a profit with an entrepreneurial venture might sound laughable.
I think it’s also true that life is a series of tradeoffs, and if you want something badly enough, you might be able to make it happen.
What if you started your own business nights and weekends while you kept the job that provided health care? Or if you’re married, if you worked out an arrangement where one of you has the job with the benefits while the other starts a business?
I got my MBA in Michigan’s part-time program, which meant I didn’t need to give up my full-time salary. Bonus: I worked at Michigan and my boss was generous enough to approve me for a tuition discount.  It meant giving up several nights a week with my husband, but five years later, I had a degree that helped me get the job I have today.
One of my cousins looked after the children of her siblings while her brothers and sisters worked together in a family business. Maybe there are creative ways like that to address child care?
Could you downsize your life — sell a car, spend less on entertainment, whatever — to make sure basics get covered while you’re starting a new career path? Or could you get a Small Business Administration loan to help with cash flow?
I’m not disagreeing that it might be hard. But anything worth having is worth fighting for.
What are your ideas for making a career switch work?