Fed up with your job? For a fee, VocationVacations can arrange for you to try out that dream pursuit.
By SUSAN ASCHOFF, Times Staff Writer
Published August 14, 2005
For two decades, civil engineer Teri Smith has inspected bridges and roadways for the state of Missouri, each workday a concrete jungle of mathematical computations and macho male co-workers. But at 45, Smith wonders if there is an unsolved X in the equation of her life.
This summer she explored a possible X or two.
She flew to New York City and worked, without pay, for an events manager and a television production company. The trips were arranged by VocationVacations, a company that charges its clients fees to let them undertake real-life samples of their dream jobs.
Smith said she had chosen engineering as a career because in high school she had liked math. In New York, she answered e-mails and printed ballots for a film festival. She schlepped candles and bedspreads through Bed Bath & Beyond to be props in a video about a feng shui expert. She tapped into the business acumen of a freelance television producer.
And she reveled in her first trip to the Big Apple and its artistic souls, far removed from her routine of asphalt and rebar.
"What I have loved the most about these VocationVacations is getting to meet the people, seeing the different personalities," says Smith, now home in El Dorado Springs, Mo. "My work is very structured. It's been a fine job, but I wonder if I need more."
VocationVacations (www.vocationvacations.com) is a way to "test drive a dream job," says Brian Kurth, who founded the company 18 months ago in Portland, Ore., where he landed after a cross country road trip in search of his own future.
The idea for the dream-job tryouts came to him about six years ago. He was stuck in Chicago traffic, he said, and began "daydreaming about what I'd rather be doing with my life."
At the time he was a marketing executive with communications company Ameritech. But he was laid off two years later - the same day his life partner quit his position at Northwestern University. They sold their condo and fled in their Honda Civic, looking for the Yellow Brick Road.
During the ensuing six-month drive, Kurth said, he kept a notebook of anecdotal research. "What do you do?" he'd asked the strangers he met. "What would you rather be?"
Kurth landed in Portland because he loved its quality of life. He launched VocationVacations in January 2004.
The company offers two- and three-day "internships" with mentors in 60 occupations, from dog trainer to winemaker to fashionista. The cost ranges from $250 to as much as $10,000 (PGA golf pro), but the average is about $2,000, one lunch included. Hotel, flight and other travel expenses are not.
Friends usually ask his clients why they would pay to work on their vacation. Why not go snooze in a hammock?
But Kurth's concept taps into Americans' dissatisfaction with their workday. Half of the workers surveyed last year by the Conference Board, a business research group, said they were happy with their jobs.
The other half complained about pressures to increase productivity, rapid changes in technology and outsourcing, health plans, salaries and hours.
From newly minted college graduates to workplace veterans, they wonder: Is this what I wanted to be when I grow up?
VocationVacations has dispatched a financial adviser to make cheese and an assistant state attorney to work in television production.
Graham Wray recounted, in a London Sunday Times Travel Magazine story, spending most of his 48 hours on his feet in a "smoke-filled pub with an unconvincing transvestite" in West Sussex. His dream of running his own convivial tavern failed to include the vision of himself struggling to haul a beer keg up the cellar stairs or emptying ashtrays, only to empty them again and again.
Michael Rau says for his VocationVacation he picked a less arduous career: He shadowed the director of race operations at Portland International Raceway.
"I did it more as an adventure," says the Seattle resident of his July VocationVacation, a 60th birthday gift from his wife.
"I've always been a car nut. I used to do a little racing."
Rau said he has no intention of ditching his job as a software engineer. But he does wish VocationVacations had been around when his daughter graduated with a degree in elementary education only to discover she disliked teaching. She now works in public relations.
In North Palm Beach, animal lover Michelle Rivera has signed on as a VocationVacations host, or mentor. Her nonprofit Animals 101 Inc. takes dogs to visit residents in nursing homes and hospices and teaches dog-bite prevention in the schools.
On her Web site, www.animals101.com there are photographs of children reading to dogs at the public library. Reluctant readers line up to do so for a one-dog audience, she says.
"A million years ago I was a paralegal. I went to school to be an office nurse," Rivera says. She found her calling while working as a volunteer at animal shelters. "I'm thrilled to have the opportunityto share that with someone else," she says.
In Portland, Kurth locates and screens mentors such as Rivera. He distinguishes the VocationVacations experience from fantasy camps for cooking, sports or rock star wannabes by describing it as a "tool in the toolbox," not an escape to make-believe.
Clients receive a pre and posttrip phone conversation with a career or life coach.
Many of those clients about to embark on their trial job are almost fearful, Kurth said.
"For some people, it's stepping so far outside their comfort zone. We're that first baby step."
Kurth said that the company is too new to have an impressive number of rerouted workers. He knows that two of his customers went into the cheesemaking business. Several others are evaluating their options after booking vacations with him.
Smith, the engineer, took two trips to New York to work with Gen Art, a film and arts events planner, and television production company Brave St.
"I don't have any dream to be in front of a camera - I don't even watch a lot of TV - but the business end of it is interesting," she said.
She escorted Kevin Bacon at a Gen Art film festival, after first printing and cutting ballots to be cast by patrons. She also spent 11 hours in an apartment with Brave St.'s Russell Best, filming a seven-minute teaser for a show that was to be pitched to a TV network.
"I can't sit on a beach," Smith said. "I can't think of a full week that I've taken a vacation and just laid around." Her husband, who manages their ready-mix concrete company, tells her if a working vacation makes her happy, go.
"When we head down our paths in life, sometimes we don't have an opportunity to check out something else," Smith said. A VocationVacation trip allows her to experience the new without abandoning the known, she said.
