Show notes
One of the hardest hit industries during the Covid-19 pandemic has been the airline industry. With global travel drastically reduced, many in the airline industry have had to make some tough choices about their careers. In this episode of Career Relaunch, flight attendant turned coder Christine Snow shares her story of stepping away from her 7-year career as a flight attendant to pursue other interests. We discuss how you can tell whether now is the right time to make a change in your career and also talk through some common hurdles, both emotional and practical, that stand in the way of starting something new. Afterwards, I address a listener question about the other parts of your life you may want to reevaluate when you’re rethinking your career. Key Career Insights Whether maintaining the current trajectory of your career makes sense. When a job isn’t fun anymore, your entire view of the industry can change. A crisis can force you to make the changes you’ve desired for so long One of the biggest hurdles in leaving your career behind is fearing that your current role is as “good as it gets” and you may ultimate just end up returning When you’re doing a job that brings you so much fulfillment, it enables you to feel like you are where you should be in your life. If you know deep down that your current job isn’t quite right for you, not knowing where you want to take your career instead can often leave you feeling stuck. Resources Mentioned Learn more about Zip Code Wilmington, the software development bootcamp Christine graduated from. I mentioned James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, a book I’m reading right now, which is really reshaping how I think about habit formation. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of taking steps to create the path you want for your career and life. If you’re reevaluating what’s next for you in your career, think about the exact type of person you want to be. Take stock of how you’re spending your days, what actions you’re taking, where you’re directing your energy, and the people you are or are NOT prioritising. Then, ask yourself whether you’re behaving in a way that’s consistent with the person you want to be. If you’re not, find a way to change how you’re running things in your life or how you’re reacting to things in your life. Maybe it’s a habit or a work pattern you’ve fallen into that you know deep down isn’t sending you in the right direction or serving what’s really important to you in your life. Take the initiative to do something about it. Make that change. Do it now . . .before you become the kind of person you don’t admire when you look yourself in the mirror. Even if it’s small change, making that change is the first step toward becoming the kinda person you wanna be and the kinda person you can feel proud of. About Christine Snow, flight attendant turned coder Christine Snow spent 7 years as a flight attendant, but her career trajectory completely changed when the pandemic hit in early 2020. While she was at home on a 6 month leave from flying last summer, she started learning how to code, and it hooked her interest and creativity. She eventually applied for and was accepted into Zip Code, a competitive 12 week software development bootcamp in Wilmington, Delaware. Having graduated right before we recorded our conversation, she had just begun her job search and interview process with nothing guaranteed, but she told me that learning this new skill has given her the confidence and hope to start a brand new career for herself in the tech industry, and that she couldn’t be more excited. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Christine know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to Audible for Supporting Career Relaunch Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode of Career Relaunch. Audible is the premier provider of digital audiobooks, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles for listening anytime and anywhere on your favorite device. Career Relaunch listeners can download a free audiobook download and get 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/careerrelaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): The pandemic forced my hand a little bit. It made me look at my career and say, ‘Look, you’ve desired something different for a while, but you haven’t done it. You haven’t had the push to do it yet, and here’s your push.’ Joseph: Hello, Christine. Thank you so much for joining me today on Career Relaunch. You are actually the very first guest I’ve had on the show in a while, since the pandemic hit last year. I really appreciate your time today. Christine: Thanks for having me. Joseph: Can you start by giving me a glimpse into what you have been focused on recently in your career and your life? Christine: I spent about the last eight years as a flight attendant in the US. Clearly, I was in the industry that was very heavily affected when the pandemic really hit last spring. I think in the US was when we first really noticed it in March. I spent most of the next six months at home in my apartment just rethinking my whole career and what this meant for the rest of my life. Did I want to try and stay in this career, if I was even able to industry-wise? During that time, I discovered this deep interest in tech and coding. You are catching me after I just completed this three-month coding bootcamp in Wilmington, Delaware, to become a Java developer. Joseph: Congratulations, first of all, on that. I know that things have actually evolved quite a bit since we’ve first connected last month. I want to get into your current situation in more detail when we get to the latter part of our conversation today. I know you mentioned that you haven’t always been a coder, and I would like to start by going back in time and want to talk about your time as a flight attendant. This is something that you did for seven years at the start of your career, and I’d love for you to just start by telling us how you got into that industry. Christine: I was in college in Atlanta, Georgia. I was graduating with my bachelor’s degree in English with a focus in Victorian-era poetry actually at the time. I was only 21. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at all. I’ve never been one of those people who is clear on what I wanted for the rest of my life. I thought at the time I really love analyzing poetry and any kind of literature, so may I’ll just go on and get my master’s in that. At the time, a friend of a friend, who was a flight attendant heard that I was graduating, and she told me, ‘Christine, you know, my company’s hiring. I could refer you.’ At the time, I was like, ‘Sure, why not? I might as well if they will hire me. I might as well put off more college for a degree I’m not even sure that I want to go have fun.’ That’s actually how I first got into it. Luckily, I was hired at the time, and I spent the next seven years flying. Joseph: Can you tell me a little bit about which carrier you worked for and what the nature of your role was? What exactly did you do on a day-to-day basis? Christine: I worked for Delta Airlines. When I was first hired, I was sent to the New York City base, and I spent most of the next seven years as a New York City base flight attendant. It was quite a big change in my life. Anyone who goes into the airline industry gets a big change schedule-wise. You are constantly traveling, especially when you’re new. You’re working a lot of back-to-back trips, so you’re not home very much. If you are excited to travel and meet new people, and you don’t need to be home every single night, it is the perfect job. It definitely was that for me for a while. Joseph: I guess all of us have cross paths if you’ve ever flown with a flight attendant, and that’s going to be your primary point of contact on a flight. It’s one of those vocations I’ve always found to be very fascinating. I’d love to hear a little bit about the good, bad, and ugly about being a flight attendant to kind of demystify the industry a bit. This is a question I’ve always wanted to ask a flight attendant but just never had the opportunity to do that. First of all, can you explain a little bit about what it takes to become a flight attendant? What’s involved with training? Christine: In the US, when you get hired to work for a major carrier, like Delta, they put you through about seven weeks of training, wherever their base headquarters are. This involves emergency training, mechanical emergency training on different aircraft types, and training you how to evacuate a plane in under a certain amount of time, all the different doors for all the different types of aircraft in the fleet. You have to be certified on those and how you would operate them both normally and in an emergency. You undergo a lot of training as well for medical emergencies. As everyone knows, anything can happen at any time. The only difference in flight is you’re stranded up there, so there’s definitely medical emergency training. As well, customer service training and how to deescalate situations and how to handle cultural situations that maybe you weren’t prepared for before you joined the industry. Joseph: I know that you mentioned deescalating situations. I know that’s been a really big role that has emerged from flight attendants just in recent months with the pandemic and face masks and all that. I won’t get into that, but I’m curious about the social side of it. You mentioned interaction with people who are flying and passengers. One of the things I’ve always wondered about, Christine, and this is probably more on longer-haul flights, is that flight attendants spend a lot of the time with one another, with fellow flight attendants. Maybe this is just my perception, but I’ve always just been curious, what do you guys talk about when you’re in the back of the plane, and you’re between serving meals? I just feel like you guys are flying together, you’re traveling together, you’re going into the same hotels. What is that side of the world of flight attendant life like? That’s an element that you may not get as much of in other, I’ll call, more 9:00-to-5:00, traditional office jobs. Christine: You’re right. Definitely we spend a lot of time together, even just in flight talking. Some of that’s talking with passengers who may come to the back just to hang out for a while, but a lot of talking with just crew. There’s actually a term that flight attendants use to describe what happens called jump-seat therapy, where you may have never flown with this other flight attendant before, but you guys are seated on jump seats right next to each other for however many days. Joseph: Right, I see that. I can kind of tell sometimes if people quite don’t know one another so well. Christine: It is a lot of meeting new people, not just meeting new passengers, but at least at my company, it was constant meeting new co-workers and knowing there’s a possibility that I may never fly with this person again. It’s a very unique work environment, I found, just in that alone, because you might make these great connections with other crew members and not see them again. It can also be helpful because if you did not bond particularly with the crew member, you might also not see them again. It’s very interesting. You’re right. Joseph: I have just a couple more questions I do want to talk about what happened in March 2020 because I’m really interested to hear about your transitions. Before we get to that, any major misconceptions you feel people have about being a flight attendant? I guess we’ll first talk about other people’s perceptions and then maybe some of your perceptions in a moment. Christine: A lot of my friends and people I’ve phoned with feel that flight attendants are seen as just the waitress or the waiter in the sky, and they feel that passengers forget sometimes that we’re there for their safety a bit. We’re there for both. We want everyone to have a good flight, but our job is more than just bringing you your Coke for example. We’re trained to make sure people make it through the flight, that if anything goes wrong, we can handle it. I think a lot of flight attendants wish that people consider that a more well-rounded picture of what a flight attendant does. Joseph: I guess there is that huge element of safety that people sometimes overlook and take for granted, but it’s such a big part of the job. Are there any things that surprised you the most about being a flight attendant, either pleasant surprises but also any sort of unexpected challenges in the job? Christine: Pretty much all of your training is what to do when the worst happens or what to do if someone gets ill. Then you get on the line, and you’re flying, and pretty much all of your job turns into customer service. You’re surprised every once in a while, when something really does go wrong, and you instantly have to respond. I remember I was pretty new at the time, maybe only a year or two in, and a woman in front of me, in front of the whole plane actually—I was standing nearby thankfully—she just started choking on her sandwich. It became apparent very quickly that she was not able to get it out of her mouth, and she stood up, and she came over to me, and I was heading over to her anyway, and I started doing the Heimlich maneuver. I was just in shock the whole time that ‘I was actually doing this.’ It’s pretty crazy how quickly everything can change. She was fine. She was totally fine. The sandwich came out. Everything went back to normal, but right after that particular moment, another passenger came up from another part of the plane. As soon as this woman was breathing again, he came up to me and he started complaining that his bag wasn’t directly above his seat in the overhead bin. I just remembered standing there, like, ‘What?’ Joseph: Oh god. Christine: It’s just a world of contradictions, I think. I don’t know. Joseph: Absolutely, yeah. Passengers can sometimes be the most unpleasant people, I would imagine. I can ask you probably about 50 other questions about this, Christine, but I know the show is about transition, so I do want to talk now and shift gears and talk about your transition out of the world of being a flight attendant. We got to talk about March 2020. That’s when, as you mentioned, the pandemic started to hit in the US, just at its infancy. I know it might be hard to go back a year, but can you take me back to the moment in March 2020 where you started to notice something happening on flights? Christine: I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It was, I think, probably like March 15th. It was right in the middle of the month, and I was working a three-day trip. At the beginning of the trip, all of our flights were still full, overbooked, oversold. Starting on about the second or third day of the trip, flights were just empty. These large planes, we would have maybe eight passengers, and that was just completely unheard of. It was quite a shock from that perspective, just seeing who was showing up and that people weren’t coming. Also, it was just kind of get…
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