In casual conversation, Maggie Finley bandies about film titles the way most people employ adjectives. She describes a Cancun beach she once visited by likening it to the seashore featured in “Contact.” She compares her work as a hospice chaplain to a Catherine Zeta-Jones scene in “Entrapment.” And the movie references that pepper Finley’s personal lexicon aren’t limited to lightweight cocktail party chitchat. In graduate school, she wrote theological analyses of films like “Chocolat” and “Educating Rita,” hardly the usual starting points for spiritual reflection. Even a brief visit with this vivacious 59-year-old, in other words, is enough to provoke one’s sense of pop culture illiteracy.

But celluloid-centered parlance comes naturally to this former professional jazz singer and entertainer, whose performance career spanned more than 20 years and whose venues stretched from Chicago to Cancun. For Finley, life has always been marked by the interplay of narrative and story. She has spun musical tales in jazz clubs and on cruise ships. She has created scenes on stage. She has interpreted characters for film roles.

These days, however, a new career as a hospice chaplain means that life has evolved into a different sort of tale for Maggie Finley. As she makes her rounds ministering to the patients of Providence Hospice of Seattle, where she has worked since September 2004, her venues are not stages but skilled nursing facilities, assisted living centers and private homes.

She’s not the primary storyteller anymore–she’s the listener now. And she loves it. For Finley, this dramatic career change, from performance to pastoral care, allows her to tap into narrative and story, but in a radically different way.

“Obviously I won’t be jumping up on stage in a nursing home,” Finley said. “But I touch into the same place in my heart that I did when I sang–music is storytelling, and when I sang, people could hear a story unfolding.”

According to Finley, her role as a chaplain is not so much to tell stories, but to encourage patients and their families to reflect on significant events and people in their own lives, with the hope that it leads to healing.

This LPGA pro has taken her game to another levelone that makes a difference in people’s lives.

Whenever Val Skinner steps up to a tee, she follows a precise, methodical routine. She stands behind the ball, stares down the fairway, fixes on her target, then lines up and takes a mighty cut, swinging through with power and confidence. That approach-and her innate abilities-have led her to six LPGA victories and placed her among the top 50 players on the tour’s career money list.

Over the last decade, however, she has turned that same focus and intensity on a different goal: raising money for breast cancer research and awareness. In 1997, in honor of her efforts, USA Weekend magazine recognizedVal as one of the country’s five Most Caring Athletes. Two years later, she became the first-and only-individual ever given the LPGA Komen Award for her work. In 2000 she received the Award of Hope from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey for raising $500,000 in a single day, the largest such donation ever for breast cancer education from a golf event.

Life Lesson

As with many of those dedicated to this cause, Val’s involvement is personal. Even now, 10 years after fellow LPGA player Heather Farr died from breast cancer, Val tears up as she recalls her friend’s battle with the disease.

The first time they met was in 1983. Val, then in her rookie season, had just finished a tremendous senior year at Oklahoma State University, winning virtually every event she entered and being named Collegiate Player of the Year by Golf Magazine. Heather, a college golfer, sought Val’s advice.

“Heather walked right up to me and kind of interviewed me about how to become a good player, which was very much like Heather to do. She was very curious, very confident,”Val remembers with a pensive smile. “She was very willing to be assertive to figure out what she needed to be successful.

I really admired that, and from that point on we built a friendship.”

Later, when both were pros, Heather confided in Val that she was flying home for a follow-up exam of a lump she had discovered in her breast six months earlier. At the time the doctor had told her it was nothing. Within a week, Val learned that Heather, then only 24, had been diag-nosed with breast cancer. “It was a life lesson for me,” says Val, “and I know that many of my fellow pros feel the same way. What all of us realized was that it could have been any of us.

Imagine a job that includes travel to faraway locations, activities such as line dancing and crafts, and the opportunity to meet 3,000 new friends every trip. Those were features of Brad Barber’s job as a cruise staffer on a cruise line. Brad describes himself as “extroverted–a real people person.”

“I work six months on and two months off,” he says. “I’ve been all over the world. But the best part is all the people I’ve met.”

Hospitality is a broad term for an industry that encompasses many types of employers and hundreds of job titles. You’re most likely to find a job in a hotel or restaurant, which are the primary employers in hospitality. Resorts, especially golf or spas, are a growing segment. Additional employers include theme parks, cruise ships, convention centers, and state and local tourism boards. According to the Travel Industry Association of America (TIAA), travelers in the U.S. spent $527 billion in 2001, which translates into 7.8 million jobs for the people serving those travelers. TIAA estimates that one out of every 18 workers in the U.S. is employed due to direct spending by travelers.

What’s for Dinner?

If you love preparing food, kick your career up a notch by considering food service. Food service is a major component of the hospitality industry. The Restaurant Association of America calculates that the industry generates $399 billion a year in sales and employs 11.6 million people. The good news is that approximately 20 percent of that workforce is between 16 and 19 years old. Entry-level jobs usually don’t require much education or experience, so it’s not surprising that almost a third of all Americans have worked in the restaurant industry at some point in their lives. Many people who have built successful careers in hospitality credit that first job. For example, 16 percent of people who now own their own restaurants began as dishwashers; 9 percent started as servers.

Employers range from fast-food chains to five-star restaurants. Food service is also provided on cruise ships, in schools and colleges, and in health care facilities. Typical entry-level jobs include bus persons and waitstaff. Waitstaff with experience can progress to the host or hostess job. Restaurants that serve alcohol employ a beverage manager, a wine steward, and bartenders. A general manager oversees the whole operation. Like all businesses, restaurants need accountants, computer specialists, and marketing or public relations people.

In numerous surveys over the years, Witt/Kieffer has asked physician executives about their career ambitions. Until recently, the majority typically expressed great interest in the post of CEO. Although reality (in the form of recent budgetary crunches) has set in to cool that ardor slightly, the desire to be CEO persists–strongly–despite the fact that physician executives can have few romantic notions left about the role.

Their ringside seats as members of the senior management team have shown the “warts and all” side of what it really means to be CEO, while the mandates and imperatives of resource constraints have continued to grow. It’s certainly not always been pretty–and, yet, physician executives continue to aim for the position. Is theirs a realistic goal? How likely is it that these CEO ambitions will be fulfilled? Today, not so likely. Tomorrow, and in the next five to seven years, their chances are much better. Ambition delayed is not, in this case, ambition denied.

CEO search trends

Witt/Kieffer handles many CEO search engagements each year, for a range of organizations that includes hospitals, health plans, integrated delivery systems, and payer organizations. And a shift in candidate qualifications is beginning to take hold. Client organizations (actually, boards of directors in this instance) are beginning to ask to see physicians represented in their CEO candidate slates. The door is opening, but slowly.

Thus far, only a few organizations have shown much interest in having physician executives as candidates for CEO. And even when competitive, viable physician executive candidates are identified for CEO roles, they have not been chosen in significant numbers. However, this should change and physician executives will come into their own as CEOs.

In 1992, Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, blasted into space. She thanked Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. Jemison told Nichols that her TV character inspired her to pursue a scientific career.

“Watching TV, playing video games, listening to music, and surfing the Internet have become a full-time job for the typical American kid,” says Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation studied 3,000 children ages 2 through 18. It learned that kids spend more than 38 hours a week using the different media.

TVIs Tops

Television is the favorite pop-culture. medium for eighth graders and younger kids. TV shows generally reflect our society, but the picture isn’t always an accurate one. For example, doctors, lawyers, entertainers, and law enforcement officers are featured on the majority of TV shows. The reason? Hollywood believes these careers have more status and are more glamorous and exciting than other occupations. In real life, most people do not work in these fields.

“Often people forget [that] a show is fiction and accept it as real,” says Michael Asimow, a law professor at UCLA and author. Asimow says that television presents a better image of lawyers than films do. Georgetown University law professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow agrees. She says The Practice constantly deals with ethical problems, but the lawyers usually seem like morally upright professionals.

“Ally McBeal is like a giant cartoon,” says Mary-Lou Galician, Ph.D., associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications. “This [law] show talks about relationships rather than the legal skills you need to succeed.”

Medical shows can help introduce people to health care careers. ER probably is the most realistic show. That’s thanks to the program’s creator, Michael Crichton, who is a physician himself. Still, it’s far from perfect. For example, the show is not realistic when it comes to infection control. For invasive procedures such as a spinal tap, doctors would wear masks, full gowns, and gloves. A pre-med student who volunteered at his local emergency room discovered big differences. Instead of thrilling challenges, doctors often deal with repetitious duties, unpleasant people, and depressing situations.

Most men consider themselves lucky if they have a prosperous, fulfilling career. Dr. Robert Gumbiner has had three: physician, chairman of a publicly held $2 billion dollar company, and museum founder. Along the way, he also found time to start the first large-scale health maintenance organization (HMO) and to publish three books and numerous articles.

Gumbiner, still energetic at 82 and the chairman of the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), reminisced one weekday afternoon in Long Beach, Calif., about his life-long passions, medicine and art, and how the two naturally intertwined.

A graduate of Indiana University School of Medicine, Gumbiner’s first career was medicine. As a pre-med student, he started to develop an interest in art. “I always collected things, and I started collecting art,” he recalls.

It was during his stint as a starving student that he accumulated photo reproductions of famous art. He hung them on his wall by simply framing them with a piece of glass and mirror clips. I thought the medical school curriculum lacked a cultural education component”, he admits. To compensate, he also took extra curricular courses in art.

The piece that started his Latin American art collection, Depressed Woman, an oil painting by Eduardo Kingman, was acquired in Ecuador in the early ’60s. Gumbiner traveled there as a volunteer for People to People. He says he noticed a painting by Kingman on the wall of one of the organizer’s home and was instantly drawn to works of Latin American artists because he found their art to be “more appealing, more understandable and easier to identify”. In addition, he wanted his collection to be cohesive: “I always wanted to focus on a niche market,” he explains.

Once he had the ability to finance his enthusiasm for. collecting art through his work as a physician, Gumbiner began to travel directly to Mexico, Guatemala, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin countries in search of just the right pieces for his ever-growing collection. “I have traveled to every Latin American country, except Paraguay and Bolivia,” he says.

If you’re already clock watching at 10 in the morning, you desperately need a career change–and quick. Here are six action-packed occupations that you can qualify for in six short months. It’s time to ditch your cubicle and become the envy of everyone you know.

LIFEGUARD

Work that golden tan while seeping out sunbathing beauties and potential drowning victims. Ideally, they’re one and the same!

Pay: $16-$20/hour.

Prereqs: A 1,000-meter swim test followed by an intensive 10-day training course. lacountylifeguards.org

EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHNICIAN

Get the fulfillment of saving lives and the fun of playing with sirens.

Pay: $12-$14/hour, plus overtime.

Prereqs: If you’re physically fit and can work well under pressure, sign up at the local community college and get certified with 120-150 hours of instruction.

Help navigate and maintain ocean-going vessels through the Sea of Cortez, Baja California, and southeast Alaska. On breaks, snorkel, kayak, and watch whales.

Pay: $13,000-$15,000 (six months).

Prereqs: A passport, drug test, and Coast Guard physical. expeditions.com

WILDERNESS FIREFIGHTER

Battle forest fires and inspire the lust of women, despite your filthy appearance.

pay: $11.75/hour, $16.80/overtime, 20% extra/hazard pay.

Prereqs: A three-mile walk with a 45-pound pack in under 45 minutes and an 80-hour training course. nifc.gov

BARTENDER

Meet hotties and hang with friends while serving suds.

Pay: The base salary is only $30-$50 a shift, but tips per week can be $2,500-$3,000.

Prereqs: Just 40 hours at a licensed bartender school. americanbartenders.org

REALTOR

Even in bad times, real estate can pay off. Plus-a free lawn sign with your name on it!

Pay: Most brokers work exclusively on commission, but 3% on six-figure houses ain’t bad.

In this period of standards-based educational reform, much attention has been focused on the educational achievement of high school graduates. In the rush to achievement testing, schools may have lost sight of the 25 percent to 30 percent high school dropout rate over the past quarter century (Barton, 2002). Barton noted that many students, both graduates and dropouts, are deficient in career-planning skills as they enter the labor market or transition to postsecondary education. In the survey of high school counselors’ career development competencies, Barker and Satcher (2000) found that counselors tended to overlook the need to implement career development programs, resulting in inadequate workplace training skills. They also noted that work-bound students received minimal counselor attention. In light of these findings, schools must provide career planning services to all students, including those who will be immediately entering the job market, with or without diploma.

Dahir (2001) presented the rationale, developmental process, content, and implications for the National Standards for School Counseling Programs (Campbell & Dahir, 1997). She noted that the National Standards are designed to guide the development of the program content for student growth and achievement in the academic, career, and personal-social domains. There are three standards concerning career development:

* Standard A: Students will acquire the skills to investigate the world of work in relation to knowledge of self and to make informed career decisions.

* Standard B: Students will employ strategies to achieve future career goals with success and satisfaction.

* Standard C: Students will understand the relationship between personal qualities, education, training, and the world of work.

8 steps to help you evaluate your career path

OPPORTUNITIES FOR physicians to have satisfying careers in management are on the rise and physicians are making the transition from clinical careers to executive positions for all sorts of reasons.

The best reasons, I believe, are the desire to take on new challenges and the chance to have a greater impact on health care in a significant management position than one-to-one patient care.

If you are considering a career in medical management or want to rise to a higher position, start with some career planning. You can get help mapping out your career path from various sources:

* The career planning department at your local university or your alma mater

* The career development service at ACPE

* Working one-on-one with a career planner experienced with health care professionals and executives

When I work with individual physicians on a career plan, I ask them to complete several tasks:

1. Identify the “energizers” and “de-energizers” in your life at work and away from work. These are the things that really turn you on and the things that drain your battery. Your goal, as you design your career, is to keep the “energizers” and toss out the “de-energizers.”

2. List the strengths and weaknesses that you think you bring to a management position.

3. Take one or more personality preference profiles. These instruments help you understand your personality preferences and likely behavior in a management or leadership role. Some useful profiles are:

* The Myers Briggs Type Inventory

* The Personal Profile System (DiSC)

* Whole Brain Analysis

4. Take a look at your past. Examine your decision to become a physician. Look at where you are now. How have you changed?

5. Make a list of three to five distinctly different jobs or careers (in or out of health care) that interest you. Do this without regard to pay or whether you are qualified for the positions.

6. Pick one or two kinds of management jobs in health care that seem most interesting and talk to physicians in those roles. Ask them what they do all day, what they did to qualify for the job, the educational requirements.

Early in my career as a general pediatrician in a multispecialty group, I knew I wanted to become a group practice medical director. At that time our group did not have a medical director. I went to national management conferences and sought Out group practice medical directors and asked them about their jobs.

What did they enjoy most about their work? What didn’t they like? How much authority did they have? How did they prepare for the position? What formal management education helped them most?

7. Look at classified ads that describe jobs that you might like.

Find out what experience and education is required.

For example, you might focus on a position as a hospital executive or a managed care medical director. Do what I call a “gap analysis.” Look at the job requirements in terms of management strengths, overall experience and business education.

Then, make a realistic assessment of where you are now. The difference between what the job requires and where you are now is the gap.

8. Come up with a way to span that gap.

Salary and promotion incentives encouraged technologists in this laboratory to cross-train and take part in more continuing education. If help-wanted ads were to reflect what medical technologists think about their jobs, many would read: “dead end,” “no room for advancement,”lack of motivation,” and “boring.” We overcame such perceptions in our laboratory by creating a voluntary career ladder that enables technical staff members to move up and encourages cross-training and continuing education.

Turnover among our 30 technologists has been small for the most part. Nevertheless, we would like to retain all of them because departures create turmoil. Whenever someone leaves, others have to work overtime until we find a replacement. And it’s no easy feat to fill a job these days, even though our well-equipped, CAP-approved lab is set in a beautiful mid-size community with many big-city amenities. Declining enrollment in our school of medical technology and the nationwide shortage of technologists have made recruitment increasingly difficult and costly.

In the fall of 1987, the section supervisors and I took a hard look at our technologists’ salary scales and career opportunities. (We already had a successful career ladder program in place for phlebotomists.’) We learned that advancement was more of a staff concern than money. It was obvious that we needed an incentive for technologists to grow and improve themselves and to become more involved in laboratory activities. Participation in cross-training was especially important to help us cope with staffing emergencies.

With these basic goals decided, the next step wag to see what other laboratories were doing. We randomly selected 12 cities of varying sizes-such as Tucson, Chicago, and Charlotte, N.C.-and focused on one hospital in each. We chose Institutions of different sizes, hoping this would give us a wider range of options and a better chance of finding a workable plan.

I called the hospitals’ laboratory directors or managers and asked about technologists’ salary levels and how their career ladder was structured if they had one. Most of the individuals surveyed were very receptive. I discovered that our salaries were highly competitive and that career ladders were a popular strategy. I also realized that no one program at another hospital met our specific needs-we would have to design our own.