Making the Switch: Is it Right For You? Testimonials in Making Career Changes Within the Operational Government Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise.

Many AMS attendees are in the first positions into which they were hired, and are working comfortably. Perhaps seeking other opportunities isn't quite on their radar yet. After all, making a job switch can be scary: moving to a new community, learning a new set of business rules in your new organization, learning local/state/federal rules that govern your duties, learning a new programming language, getting to know a new team of peers...subordinates...bosses! Making a job switch can also be exhilarating: falling in love with your new community, bringing previous experience to improve business rules, realizing that working at the state or local level can be just as impactful as working at the federal level, developing leadership and followership skills in ways you didn’t know were possible. In this talk, the author will set the scene for the incredible breadth of Operational Government Meteorology careers available to the WWCE, sharing vignettes, including her own, of successful switches with testimonies of the scariest and most exhilarating parts of the experience. The plan is to assemble vignettes that span federal, state, and local agencies, early-, mid-, and late-career, as well as changes across agencies at the same level, such as from the Department of Commerce to Department of Homeland Security.