The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the career changes of former student affairs (SA) professionals who left campus-based work for adjacent or new industries to understand their experiences. This study expands the SA career scholarship and helps current SA scholars and professionals understand the full range of career experiences in the field by presenting the stories of former SA professionals with diverse positionalities who broke away from the SA career. Using story as a methodology and an interpretive framework informed by life course perspectives, I aimed to answer the following research question: How did former student affairs professionals experience their career change? The findings suggested that former SA professionals experienced career change in the following ways: (1) Career Needs, Values, and Turning Points, which refer to the influence of early life career needs and values of stability, support, consistency, well-being, agency, and inclusion as well as turning points in the student affairs career involving concerns with salary, workplace exclusion, privileged students, work-life integration, and supervisors in driving participants’ decision to change careers; (2) Constraints and Resources, which illustrate the role the student affairs profession, family and community, and new workplaces, and the linked lives within these contexts, in shaping participants’ transitions through constraints (i.e., lack of information, disapproval from colleagues and mentors, skepticism, and exclusion) and resources (i.e., supportive colleagues, transferable skills and knowledge, financial assistance, informational support, networking, work-life integration, social support, and professional growth opportunities); and (3) Exercising Agency, which points to participants’ efforts to shape their experience by planning their career change and supporting others’ career development in student affairs, even after leaving the field. Considering the findings, this dissertation argues that former SA professionals experienced career change based on the interaction between their early lives and career turning points, external settings and actors, and individual decisions, reflecting their diverse positionalities. This study calls on the SA field to meet its workforce’s diverse career development needs by not only improving SA careers for those who choose to remain or return but also by further studying and supporting career changes beyond campus-based education.
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