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Professional planner inspires students of all ages

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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 23:00
A broken leg in college temporarily kept Richard Muther from studies, but gave him thinking time that launched his future.
Muther, 95, Kansas City, Mo., coaches Multiple Careers Planning Workshops, using strategies he developed while healing from a hockey injury during his college years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his injury, Muther said he attended college with no direction or career goal in sight.
“I had plenty of time to think,” Muther said. “I thought my way through a strategy of planning my life.”
Muther said his life fell into place once he decided on a career path, which included several professions he began pursuing in earnest.
“One career doesn’t make any sense. Why not three?” Muther said.
Muther decided to become a manufacturing manager, manufacturing consultant and educator. He put a plan in motion focusing on education, experience and exposure. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business and engineering from MIT, and worked and volunteered in industry-related positions.
By his senior year in college, Muther had visited 125 industrial plants.
“That was part of my strategy,” he said. “I wanted to be an international consultant.”
Muther later applied his systematic planning to industrial facilities, eventually opening a consulting firm in Kansas City, Mo., which he led for 40 years.
In 1984 the National Society of Engineers asked Muther to apply his industrial planning strategies to young engineers, helping them become more professionally qualified. When Muther began training engineers, he learned from research the average American employee cycles through five to 15 careers in a lifetime.
Muther developed Multiple Careers Planning Workshops, a hands-on think shop for young adults, which he continues coaching today. Retired from a career colored with international consulting, teaching, and publishing more than 14 planning books, Muther’s workshops remain in demand at churches, schools, banks and professional societies.
“I enjoy sharing ideas,” he said. “If you have an idea you’re enthusiastic about, you like to share that.”
Sandy Colt, 60, a dyslexia specialist in Houston, participated in Muther’s February workshop at Country Club United Methodist Church. It was Colt’s second enrollment in Muther’s workshop after 25 years. She said she used Muther’s techniques while raising her family, most recently helping her teenager whittle down college choices.
“It helped me have a renewed sense that I would think more clearly about the meaningful work I do now,” she said. “It helped me reassess where I want to go.”
Colt said her father hired Muther in 1959 to help him plan a layout for his manufacturing plant in Coffeeville, Kan. Muther became a family friend and mentor to most of her family members. Colt’s husband and two of her children also have taken a Muther workshop.
“He’s energetic,” Colt said of Muther’s presentations. “It is like a 60-year-old is giving it.”
Colt said she has referred back to her original workbook that Muther still uses in his workshops. The workbook, “Six Steps to Making Your Own Personal Multiple Careers Plan,” allows users to discover their own plan through analysis.
“It made it more analytical than emotional,” Colt said.
John Hickman, 42, St. Joseph, Mo., also attended the February workshop. An entrepreneur working the bugs out of a new software program he developed, Hickman said he gained new insight after the presentation.
“It fundamentally changed the way I approached the development of the product,” Hickman said. “I’m fascinated by his systematic process.”
Muther said the workshops stem from his philosophy of planning for uncertainties life.
“Bring the future to you,” he said.
For information on Multiple Careers Planning, call 444-2189.

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