Karen Cresson:
Changing Careers
After ten years as an elementary school teacher, Karen
Cresson prepares her portfolio to get a job as an account
executive with a computer company.CAREER SITUATION
Karen Cresson wants to change careers. She’s been a sixth-grade
teacher for the past ten years, has enjoyed many aspects of her job, and
has done well at it. But she’s ready to move on. She enjoys teaching and
believes in education, but she feels constrained by the classroom and by
the limits of her duties as a sixth-grade teacher.
Not sure what direction she wanted to go in next, Karen started
assembling a Master Portfolio. She hoped that gathering together doc-
uments that demonstrate important things about her might give her
some ideas. And it did. The note she got from a colleague thanking her
for restoring his computer when it crashed in the middle of class re-
minded Karen that people were always turning to her for help with
computers. The certificate she received for completing a course on edu-
cational software brought back memories of how much fun she had tak-
ing a course that many of her colleagues found intimidating. And the
letter from the principal of her school thanking her for persuading a
local company to donate computers to her classroom made her feel all
tingly. Why tingly, she asked herself? Was it the praise? Not really.
There were many notes of praise she’d received from the principal that
she was pleased to get, but that didn’t excite her thatmuch.205
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