Brother Jim Kell

“The longer I do career counseling, the younger in everything but age I become. I help people show themselves how, with God’s grace, they can be empowered to find the job they love and for which they have the skills. My contribution is a way of giving back to God the gift God has given me.”

If you e-mail the web site of Dick Bolles, jobhuntersbible.com, author of What Color is Your Parachute?, your reply comes from Brother Jim Kell. Clients not only benefit from his professional knowledge, but from the sympathy of someone who has changed careers several times during his own life.

After his discharge from the Air Force during the Korean War, Brother Jim entered Saint Edward’s University. He had met a Catholic soldier in the service, and by the time he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Education and Social Studies, he had become a Catholic himself. He entered the Brothers of Holy Cross and, about two years later, began studying for his master’s degree in Economics at the University of Notre Dame.

Teaching high school and his pursuit of a second master’s in Library Science took up the next 20 years. His career path “forked” when he became Assistant Provincial in 1979. His responsibilities included helping fellow Brothers develop career plans. To educate himself about the process, Brother Jim took a workshop led by Dick Bolles.

“That experience was absolutely revelatory,” he recalls. “Everything that happens, I believe, has a purpose and a meaning that moves a person along in his or her journey in life. I received my library science degree in January of 1979, but I never had a chance to practice it and wouldn’t go back to it now, though I loved it at the time.”

In 1987 Brother Jim attended his second Bolles’ workshop, seeking his next “career” as his term of office as Assistant Provincial drew to a close. “The workshop told me that I wanted to stay in career planning because I’d fallen in love with it,” he recalls. “When I began working as an academic advisor at Saint Edward’s University, I arrived knowing that my goal was to establish career planning classes. By fall 1989 I was teaching three of them.”

Brother Jim left SEU because of a hearing impairment in spring 1996, and turned his “retirement” into career consulting. “I called St. Ignatius, Martyr Church and said, ‘I will do career planning free for members of your parish if you give me an office,’” he says. Today he guides both parishioners and non-parishioners in identifying and achieving their mission in life, and the career goals and objectives they have set for themselves. He also has picked up a sideline.

“In summer 1999, Dick Bolles invited me to answer e-mails for him,” explains Brother Jim. “Over three years later, I’ve answered 4,050 e–mails from China, Austria, Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom, South America, and all over the United States.”

A great number of clients, Brother Jim reflects, grow spiritually through their job searches.

“On a client’s first visit, I ask the person to print his or her name on the back of a prayer card,” he says. “I tell them that I begin each day with an hour of prayer, and these are their prayer cards. At any one time there are 1500 to 2000 names of people from different religious backgrounds, and they form a true spiritual community.”

“Together our prayers lift up, guide, lead, comfort, and support everyone whose name is on those cards,” he continues. “It’s not a grocery list — we don’t know if we’re giving to someone in the group or receiving. We create more spiritual energy than we need when we have a good day.”

Set free, that energy radiates through every interaction and decision of the day — and it can help us see a pattern of purpose in unexpected twists and turns. “Life is about being and becoming, not about arriving,” says Brother Jim. “And that is what our career is about. I spent 22 years as a high school teacher, and it cannot hold a candle to what I’m doing now. But teaching helped to prepare me for the consulting I do with people now.”