Southern California Job Market : Transitions : What Do You Do When Your Job Disappears? : Step 1 for Teacher: Decide What He Wants

Teaching public school in Highland Park hasn’t soured Michael Lew on the importance and the potential of public education. State budget bickering has.

The 28-year-old UCLA graduate has taught 7th-, 8th- and 9th-graders math and computers for more than three years. But he’s not happy that legislators in Sacramento are debating slashing teacher pay.

“They’re proposing a 17% cut in salaries,” Lew says.

For Lew, the reduction would cut his $29,500 salary by $4,000--without easing his workload. The proposal alone has prompted Lew to reconsider his career.

Not that a possible pay cut is the only issue. As a teacher, he’s dealt with the full range of students: bright, bored, boorish.

“There are so many students who behave poorly, if we expelled them, 10% of the school’s population would be on the streets,” he says.

His own childhood in Echo Park had prepared him for students who boast about the violence they encounter in their daily lives. “I see through a lot of their false bravado,” Lew says. “I’m Chinese, and I grew up in a poor Mexican neighborhood. I had more violence directed toward me than many of these kids have had.”

In some ways, the work has hardened Lew: “In three years, my views have changed,” he says. “No matter how much money we pump into the system, we can’t teach people to take care of their kids.”

Among the options Lew is weighing: a return to his former line of work, calculating insurance risks as an actuary.

The Los Angeles resident left that job largely because he needed more time to market a piece of exercise equipment he had designed--the wooden “push-up disk.” Having boxed since high school, Lew wanted something that would develop arm muscles the way a boxer develops biceps. The disk rotates the arms of a person doing pushups, just as a boxer twists his arms when he throws a punch.

To market the disk, Lew started a company, Overtime Sports. While he hasn’t sold many disks, designing and marketing them has made him aware of new career vistas: “I would love to work for a sporting goods company and help them develop new items,” he says.

But Lew, whose college degree is in mathematics, sees that goal as long term. Meanwhile, he’s taken entrance exams for business schools and plans to apply this fall.

What the Experts Say

DIAGNOSIS: Lew has reached a turning point at a bad time.

PRESCRIPTION: Victor Lindquist, dean of placement at Northwestern University, says too many MBAs are out of work. Lew should defer school or go part-time. Gary Saenger of the Los Angeles office of Right Associates, an outplacement firm, says Lew must assess what he really wants to do. If he loved the sales component of his business, “spend two, three years carrying a bag for a solid company.” If he preferred design, he should pursue that. And both experts support a return to actuarial work.

PROGNOSIS: Lew is young and versatile. If he seriously evaluates his interests and the outlook in those fields, he’ll do fine.

State and Local Government Outlook The number of jobs in this sector, which includes education, increased by 20% dring the 1980s. However, a string of budget shortfalls led to layoffs for an estimated 26,000 government workers in the last year, and 21,000 more are expected in the year ahead.

Source: UCLA Business Forecasting Project