This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Ditching the Degree series, where women who have built six-figure careers without a bachelor’s degree reveal the secrets of their success. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.

Bridgette Tena has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. She says she couldn’t be happier. 

The 51-year-old is a roofer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, part of the less than 10% of women working in construction in the U.S.

Roofers face the second highest rate of fatal work injuries among all occupations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Roofing is also one of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S., with nearly 15,000 jobs expected to be added each year over the next decade. 

“Working in this field is hard, don’t get me wrong, but it’s beyond rewarding,” Tena tells CNBC Make It. “It’s the coolest job ever. I love what I do.”

Tena started building and repairing roofs as a side hustle four years ago to supplement her real estate broker income and learn more about the construction side of the housing market. 

She launched her own roofing business, B. Barela Construction, in February 2021. 

Last year, B. Barela Construction brought in about $180,000 in revenue, and the business is on track to surpass $200,000 in revenue for 2024, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. 

Her combined income from running B. Barela Construction and working in real estate is more than $70,000 (she declined to share her exact salary). 

Ahead of her fourth year in business, Tena says she hopes to scale the business into a full-time career. 

Here’s how Tena found a job she loves and built a business bringing in six figures— without a bachelor’s degree: 

Tena jokes that she was “destined” to work in construction as her uncle and grandfather were both general contractors. “It’s something that was always tugging at my heart, but it took me years to finally chase that dream and follow that career path,” she says. 

She attended Santa Fe Community College on and off between 1995 and 2002, waffling between entering business, law or real estate, but never finishing her bachelor’s degree. 

After leaving college, Tena worked as a receptionist in a local realtor’s office in Santa Fe and obtained both her realtor and real estate broker licenses. 

Realtors are licensed to help people buy, sell, and rent real estate and must work for a sponsoring broker or brokerage firm, while brokers have additional training and can work independently or hire other real estate agents to work for them.

Tena worked as a broker for more than a decade but didn’t find the career fulfilling on its own; she soon realized that she “belonged outside, not in an office.” 

But the reason she didn’t start working in construction sooner, she says, is because “it’s such a man’s world.” 

“I never saw someone who looked like me working in the field, and as a woman, it was scary and intimidating to get into that kind of work on your own,” Tena adds. 

Tena started apprenticing with a general contractor on construction projects in 2016.

She was inspired to take the leap and obtain her general contractor (construction) license with the state of New Mexico during the pandemic lockdown of 2020 when demand for real estate slowed and she suddenly had more free time. It only took her a few weeks to finish the certification.

In New Mexico, prospective general contractors must pass a trade-specific exam and show they’ve completed at least two years of work experience with a licensed contractor in the state to obtain the certification.

Tena spent most of the lockdown drafting a business and marketing plan, practicing installation and repair techniques on a shed in her backyard and researching names for her roofing business.

She officially launched B. Barela Construction in February 2021, less than a year after obtaining her license. The name pays homage to Tena’s grandfather, Lino Barela, who inspired her to pursue a career in roofing and construction.

Since then, Tena has pursued several specialized licenses to expand her business’ offerings. In 2023, she attended a free two-week GAF Roofing Academy training program in Denver, Colorado which was held exclusively for women.

Through the program, Tena received a roofing certificate that covers shingle installation and roof coating, among other skills. 

The requirements to become a roofer vary state by state in the U.S., but most states will require roofers to have a local license and complete an apprenticeship or on-the-job training. 

The start-up costs to becoming a roofer including training, licensing and equipment can range anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 or more, Tena says, adding that she spent about $20,000 of her personal savings to launch her roofing business. 

That initial investment, however, can pay off, as more experienced roofing contractors earn upwards of $100,000 in the U.S., per ZipRecruiter’s estimates. 

Tena adds that running your own roofing business has an even greater earning potential, as you can set your prices and take on more customers. She says there’s high demand now for roofers due to backlogs brought on during the pandemic and supply chain issues.

It didn’t take Tena long to drum up business, she says, as she’s a Santa Fe local and has a wide network of builders, construction foremen, and other potential customers from working in real estate for so many years. 

Tena says that on a typical weekday, she works from 6 a.m. until 4 p.m., but is also on call during the evenings and weekends for emergency repairs, whether it’s a leaky ceiling or crumbling drywall. 

“We’re always rushing around with our ladders,” Tena says. For Tena, a typical day on the job involves climbing up a slender ladder and working on top of commercial buildings and homes that are 8, sometimes 30 feet high.

Once she’s up there, she and her team might remove old roofs, install new shingles or repair holes. Because she’s up so high, and working with hazardous materials including saws and nail guns, Tena wears a hard hat, thick leather gloves, a safety harness and other protective equipment to minimize injury.

She works with four full-time employees and close to a dozen contractors, many of whom are women — her mother and daughter have often joined her to help on bigger jobs. 

“There was one customer when we showed up with an all-women crew, who looked at us and said, ‘Where are the roofers?’ and I told him, ‘We are’ and he was like, ‘No, the men,’” Tena recalls. “That was brutal, but I told the girls we have to let stuff roll off our back, that creating an inclusive environment for women in construction starts with us.” 

Roofing might not be a popular career choice among young professionals but it’s an “underrated” field that can provide a lot of stability and fulfillment, Tena says. 

“People are always going to need a roof over their heads, so roofers are always going to be in demand,” she adds. “You’re not just working; you’re protecting what’s most important to people — their homes. It’s hard to find that kind of fulfillment in many jobs.”

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Register now and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.

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Jenny Lei looked at the towering stack of cardboard boxes in her Hoboken, New Jersey, apartment. She’d spent $30,000 on handbags and needed a new strategy to sell them.

An unemployed UX designer, Lei had taken it upon herself to create the perfect work bag. She spent months designing a prototype before ordering a production run. Four weeks later, she’d only sold 20 totes.

“My plan failed spectacularly,” says Lei. “I couldn’t afford to not make it work. [A lot] of my savings were sitting in boxes in my living room.”

Today, Lei is the 28-year-old CEO and founder of Freja, a New York-based company that sells work totes, shoulder purses and travel accessories. The 4-year-old startup brought in more than $9 million in revenue over the last 12 months, including $2 million in profit, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

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Lei is Freja’s only full-time employee, alongside five contract workers. She credits her company’s growth — not easy, in the highly competitive fashion industry — to cultivating loyal customers, drawing them in with minimalistic bag designs and a public commitment to environmental sustainability.

“From the beginning, I thought, ‘Does the world even need another handbag brand?’ Not really, if I’m going to do things the way that everyone else has,” Lei says. “But I thought if I could do it in a way that felt really good to me, and would resonate with a certain group of people … it was worth the try, right?”

Here’s how Lei turned hundreds of unsold bags into a profitable luxury handbag company, despite her lack of fashion experience.

In February 2019, Lei was a soon-to-be-unemployed graduate student at Cornell University preparing for a job interview in New York. She tried pairing three different work bags with her outfit, and none of them worked. One was too small. Another didn’t offer enough interior organization.

It was like “when your apartment is messy and you can’t think straight,” Lei says. “What I wear is a big part of my confidence … It felt like I went in on the wrong foot, when I was already nervous.”

After the interview, Lei sat in Bryant Park and sketched out a structured bag with interior compartments for her laptop and portfolio, and a strap long enough to fit over a winter coat. She dipped into her savings — $300,000, gained from a purse dropshipping side hustle she ran during graduate school — to order a $2,000 prototype from a sample maker in Brooklyn.

The result “looked like a kindergartener’s art project,” says Lei. So when she visited her parents in Guangzhou, China, that summer, she toured factories that specialized in vegan leather. She chose the factory that was the most communicative and transparent about its working conditions, she says.

“As a Chinese person, I wanted Freja to kind of be my way of showing the world this is what ‘Made in China’ can look like,” says Lei.

She ordered an initial run of 300 bags, created a website, started a marketing campaign to collect potential customers’ email addresses and wrote blog posts about Freja’s values and practices. Sales flopped: It took Lei a year to offload her inventory, she says.

Feeling financially pressured, Lei doubled down — ordering a second run of inventory, which featured a second bag design, and investing more into a harder social media advertising push.

“It was really, really slow for the first two years,” says Lei.

In 2022, Lei finally sold enough bags — largely through social media ads — to bring in $1.7 million in annual revenue. She spent that money, along with two loans from Shopify, on a broader array of bag designs, hoping to expand her target audience beyond environmentally conscious working women.

The results were near-immediate. Freja brought in $5.3 million last year, becoming cash-flow positive enough to pay off both Shopify loans. The company is on track to finish 2024 with $12 million in annual revenue this year, says Lei.

Yet within the context of the $22.8 billion global luxury handbag market, Freja barely registers as a competitor. LMVH, which owns designer labels like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Celine and Loewe, made $16.85 billion in U.S. dollars in net profit last year. Other established brands, like Sandy Liang and Alaia, sell stylistically similar bags as Freja, too.

The steep competition means that merely surviving is a best-case scenario for most niche fashion brands, says Katie Weir, a consumer and luxury industry strategist at Deloitte. Staying relevant over time “is really, really hard, particularly in this space,” she says.

Startups that stick around constantly evolve to keep up with fashion trends and consumer desires, Weir notes. Lei hopes to achieve that by hosting events to build customer loyalty, becoming a small-business mentor to other young women and using a growing array of bag styles to capture a wider audience.

“One thing I kept telling myself was, ‘No one is born a designer,’ but I can become one in a couple of years if I give it a go,” says Lei. “I think now maybe this year I can start calling myself a designer … I think we’ve hit a stride.”

Conversions from EUR to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 EUR to 1.05612 USD on November 19, 2024. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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My research team at Harvard Business School and I spent a decade interviewing people to uncover the psychological, relational and life restructuring challenges of retiring — and how best to navigate them.

We discovered that identity issues can loom large for people. That’s especially true in the early phases of retiring, when they grapple with the decision about when and how to leave, and try to detach psychologically from their careers. 

These concerns can be especially difficult for those who identify closely with their work.

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If you want to have a smooth transition into a satisfying retirement life, there are many questions you can ask yourself — chief among them, “Do I have enough money saved?” — before leaving work behind. 

But by far, one of the most important ones is, “Who will I be without my work?”

Here is my best advice on how to answer this for yourself. 

Even people who don’t think they’ve identified closely with their work throughout their careers can be blindsided by identity issues. 

Take Irene, one of the 120 subjects we followed. Before she retired, she liked her job in the tech world, enjoyed her team, and respected her company. Her work had never defined her. Yet it took her four years to take the plunge and officially leave.

When she asked herself, “Well, why don’t you just retire?” her answer was, “People do respect you while you’re still working. And after, maybe not so much.”

That identity of “successful career woman” had been more important to her than she’d realized.

So what can you do if you can’t fully answer the question of who you will be without your work?

1. Start by asking yourself the identity question we asked our interviewees: “Would I be more likely to say that my work is what I do or my work is who I am?” If the honest answer is that your job feels like who you are, that insight could help you consider to what extent your strong work identity holds you back from starting a possibly wonderful retirement life. Or at least complicates your transition.
2. List your core self-identities, along with your most salient needs, values, goals, and preferences — as they currently are, and as you imagine (or wish) them to be in the foreseeable future. For example, a person might list “leader,” “friendly,” “mother,” “coach,” and “physical fitness,” “companionship,” and “meaningful activity.”

Now think about the aspects of your pre-retirement self you’d like to carry over into your retirement life in some way. We call this “identity bridging.” 

A retired company executive we call Victor had identified strongly as a leader in his company. He bridged that “leader” identity in a deeply satisfying way by stepping into a leadership position in his church not long after leaving the office.

Soon after retiring from the partnership of his consulting firm, another one of our interviewees, Jay, said his job was “who I was.” Throughout his long career, he had lost sight of — or, perhaps, had never discovered — who he “really” was.

Coming to a new understanding, or discovery, became his big retirement project. 

Jay reactivated a long-dormant identity as a “hot rodder,” from the years in his young life that he was active in customizing old cars, racing them, riding in rallies and enjoying the camaraderie of that community. 

When he reduced his work commitment to half-time for six months, he bought a hot rod and began customizing it. To Jay, this felt like an important step toward discovering who he “really” was, without work as a major context in his life.

And Irene? Soon after finally retiring, she moved with her still-working husband to their nearby vacation home on Cape Cod and oversaw its renovation. Within a year, she joined an ocean conservation group and became active in many water-oriented activities. She had developed an important new post-retirement identity: “ocean person.”

Ultimately, as you explore retirement, consider who you are in your career life, which pieces of your working self you’ll be able to take with you, and which ones you want to leave behind. Then allow yourself to think expansively. What new identities might you enjoy developing in this next stage of life? 

If you can do that honestly, you’re more likely to find a satisfying retirement on the other side. 

Teresa M. Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita at Harvard Business School. Teresa received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, and she is the co-author of ”Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You.”

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Sign up today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.

Excerpt adapted from “Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You” by Teresa M. Amabile, Lotte Bailyn, Marcy Crary, Douglas T. Hall, Kathy E. Kram. Copyright © 2025 by Teresa M. Amabile et al. Adapted with permission of Routledge. All rights reserved. 

When you’re doing a job interview, whether virtual or in person, you’ll want to follow the appropriate etiquette.

“You want to make sure that you’re making good eye contact,” says Emily Levine, executive vice president at recruitment firm Career Group Companies, “that you’re reading the room in terms of when it’s appropriate to speak, when it’s appropriate and time to ask questions.”

Levine has interviewed “thousands and thousands of people” in her career, she says, often for A-list celebrities looking for personal assistants or chiefs of staff.

Here are Levine’s best tips for avoiding her top red flags in a job interview.

To begin with, you’ll want to make sure you arrive at an appropriate time, especially if you’re there in person.

Arrive too late, and you risk missing part of your interview, wasting your interviewers’ time and making a bad impression. But “if you show up too early, it’s also too eager and might make the interviewer feel rushed,” says Levine. Ten minutes early is the “perfect” time to walk into your interviewer’s office.

“I recommend making sure that you are parked 15 to 20 minutes early in the building” as a precaution, says Levine. That will ensure you have enough time to find the suite or office number but that you’re not there long before the interview starts.

Presentation is also key.

If you’re online or in person, “don’t chew gum, don’t have your sunglasses on your head” during the interview, says Levine. These are too casual and unprofessional.

If you’re in person only, make sure you don’t come in “smelling like cigarette smoke or wearing too much perfume,” she says. A lot of people are sensitive to smell and you want to make sure it’s not uncomfortable for them to be in the same room.

You want to leave “an impression based on your experience, not the way that you’re dressed or you smell,” she says.

Finally, regardless of your professional past, be strategic about how you talk about it.  

Avoid bad-mouthing previous employers, for example, or “divulging too much information that’s proprietary or confidential,” says Levine. Especially in her line of work, some of her clients make their employees sign non-disclosure agreements. When candidates tell her they’ve signed an NDA but still proceed to divulge confidential information about a previous employer, it’s a red flag.

Regardless of how private your employer was, spilling secrets gives the impression that if your interviewer hired you and shared proprietary information, in the future, you “would most likely do the same” with them, says Levine.

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Start today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through Nov. 26, 2024.

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Earning a big salary can be a sign of broader success. For corporate ladder-climbers, it could indicate years of effort to level up. For others, like doctors and lawyers, it may reflect years of education and strong academic performance.

But regardless of how you get there, Americans, on average, say it takes an annual salary of $270,214 to be financially successful, according to a recent survey by Empower, a financial services company.

That’s more than three times the median household income of $80,610, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In fact, just 10% of U.S. households earned more than $234,900 in 2023.

But with living costs pinching even high earners and the fact that more money almost always brings individuals more happiness, it’s understandable that Americans say you need a substantial salary to be considered successful.

While the average salary Americans say they need to be successful is high compared with what the average person is currently earning, Gen Z sets their sights even higher. The average salary adults between the ages of 18 and 27 say they need to be successful is $587,797, Empower found.

That’s far more than each of the other adult generations. Here’s the average salary older adults said would make them feel successful:

• Millennials (ages 28 to 43): $180,865
• Gen X (ages 44 to 59): $212,321
• Baby boomers (ages 60 to 78): $99,874

It’s common for individuals to feel they’re doing worse than their peers, with 49% of Americans feeling less financially successful than others. That could be part of the reason they say they’d need such a high salary to feel accomplished, says Rebecca Rickert, head of communications at Empower.

Most Americans (60%) also say financial success is harder for their generation to achieve, compared with other generations. Baby boomers are the least likely to share this sentiment, with just 49% agreeing, while millennials are the most likely, with 69% agreeing.

“The majority [of respondents] think prosperity is harder to achieve for their generation — which factors into the magic number people attach to success,” Rickert says.

It’s a similar story when it comes to net worth. On average, Americans say you need a net worth of about $5.4 million to be considered successful, Empower reported. And once again, Gen Z blew that number out of the water with even bigger expectations.

Here’s the average net worth each generation says would make them feel successful:

• Gen Z: $9.5 million
• Millennials: $5.6 million
• Gen X: $5.3 million
• Baby boomers: $1 million

“Younger generations are the most optimistic about achieving financial success in their lifetime, though they estimate it’ll take more money to get there,” Rickert says. 

Especially for those just starting out, “the big finish may seem further out, especially given economic uncertainty or the prospect of income instability, which people see as barriers to their success,” she adds.

Want to earn more money at work? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Negotiate a Higher Salary. Expert instructors will teach you the skills you need to get a bigger paycheck, including how to prepare and build your confidence, what to do and say, and how to craft a counteroffer. Start today and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 50% off through November 26, 2024.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.