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Chris Kuhn

Editor, skirt! Tampa Bay

I'm an outspoken thirtysomething who has lived in the Tampa Bay area since 1992, full of useless facts on just about every facet of pop culture. I'm passionate about vegetarianism without passing judgment. I love to laugh. If we can't talk politics, music, movies, sports, TV or current events, you'...

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A Different Landscape

Chris Kuhn, Editor for skirt! Tampa Bay

Traveling. If ever there was some experience that felt completely unnatural, it’s flying. Lucky me, today i got to do that, not once but twice.

We’re visiting my husband’s family in Rochester, New York this weekend and hitting a high school reunion (his – I boycotted the whole concept of mine after the tenth, remember?)  Anyway, I promised I wouldn’t divulge the number for his here but let’s just say I’m absolutely amazed that he and his classmates are still close enough to WANT to see each other after all of these years. Many still live in the Rochester area. It’s a different part of the country and a different generation. Here, you went to school and you worked in an industry – whether it was Xerox, Kodak or Bausch & Lomb – you were somehow likely affiliated with one of the big three. But you stayed here. You worked here, you got married and raised a family and stayed here. For me growing up, most of us stemmed from Northern transplants ane when many of us went to college, we used this opportunity to move away and start our own careers elsewhere. Not all of us, but a lot of us anyway.

Not here, not in Roch. Now, of course, after many years of an increasingly depressed economy particularly in the industries that helped make this town once thrive, their technologies are being matched or surpassed by Japanese competitors, jobs have been steadily eliminated and it’s just not the same here. Many have found no choice but to move away or develop new second careers later in life after investing so much of their time into companies they had planned to work their whole lives supporting but who in turn will not get the support back in the form of pensions or long-term benefits they had once come to expect.

It is definitely a different place but especially a different time.

I don’t ever remember feeling this kind of allegiance for any company. Sure, I was taught by baby boomers that you got out of college and maybe it took one or two companies, but you found that one special place of work and then you just STAYED there. (Were you taught that, too?) I almost felt like a failure every time I switched jobs and companies (there goes that lovely Midwestern guilt again!)

In just 16 years in the Tampa Bay workforce since graduating college, I’ve found myself at 7 different companies. To me, this seems like the nature of my work which was primarily marketing and in the technology field for a great deal of that time, one of the most face-paced and dynamic industries out there. But talking to folks who’ve worked for the local newspaper for 10, 20 years of their lives – in some cases, their only job out of high school or college! – it strikes me how different the workforce is now.

 I’ve always considered it ironic how I ended up in a media organization after studying media in college nearly 20 years ago but headed down a different track due to the economy at that time. Now, our country faces yet another time of economic crisis and I wonder how it will impact the direction today’s graduates will mold their own career paths to adjust to current circumstances.

If you transplanted from one part of the country to another recently, what kind of changes did you notice in expectations or corporate culture? Or if you too found your own planned career path impacted by the economic picture when you entered the workforce, what did you do to adjust?

As I travel here and see more closed up businesses than I remember seeing on our last visit, I’m reminded of what a different world it’s become.