Career Change, Caring and Losing a Husband |Caroline Smith

Caroline Smith started out teaching PE. She's now General Manager of Apprenticeship Careers Australia, and the road between those two things ran straight through her husband's terminal diagnosis. Caroline retrained in accounting while caring for Nigel, raising Emily, and later watching her mum slip into dementia. She'll tell you she hasn't done anything special. Cynthia Myssy disagrees. They talk career change under pressure, why resilience isn't a personality trait some women have and others lack, and why the gender gap in trades runs in both directions.

Key Takeaways:

• Career Change You Did Not Choose: When Nigel was told he could no longer work, Caroline's retraining stopped being a someday idea and became a decision. She chose accounting deliberately, for employability across any industry rather than for any love of numbers.
• Resilience Is Not a Personality Trait: Caroline's position is that she did nothing exceptional, that anyone facing the same circumstances would have done the same, and that capability only reveals itself once it is tested.
• What a School Gives You Decades Later: She credits the strength that carried her to her teachers at Santa Sabina and to a Year 12 class in 1994, absorbed rather than taught, years before she knew she would need it.
• Admitting You Cannot Do It Alone: Looking herself in the eye and accepting she could not manage on her own is what made everything afterwards possible, including keeping Nigel at home rather than in a nursing home.
• Recovery Takes Longer Than the Crisis: After years of running on adrenaline, Caroline had to learn how to stop being on alert, and says she has only really managed it in the last three or four years.
• The Gender Gap in Trades Runs Both Ways: Women make up as few as 4 per cent of some construction and automotive roles, men under 10 per cent in aged care and health, and Caroline argues that any field dominated by one gender will create skills shortages in that field.

Notable Quotes:

1. "We're all capable of it, but it just depends on whether we're ever confronted by something like that." — Caroline Smith
2. "You've got to look yourself in the eye and say, can I manage this on my own? And the answer is no." — Caroline Smith
3. "Whether they did it directly or whether you sort of picked up some of that resilience and some of that determination through osmosis, it certainly stuck." — Caroline Smith
4. "It just felt like everything was necessary." — Caroline Smith
5. "Courage is having a crack, even if it means that you're potentially going to fall over or you're going to make a fool of yourself." — Caroline Smith
6. "I think no one goes through life unscathed." — Cynthia Myssy

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