It’s Less About the Climb and More About the Quality of the Work
The concept of “career” takes on a different complexion as you move through the decades. For the experienced fifty-something professional who’s seen and done a lot, it’s much about finding fresh ways to contribute and create, not climb. It’s also a personal drive to (pick your flavor) reset, refresh, recharge, and sometimes build new. In many instances, individuals want a career chane to do something related but different (or in some cases completely different) than how they’ve earned their living for the past few decades.
Making a significant career shift in your 50’s (or any age) is daunting. Here are some experience-tested ideas to help you get started.
Resist the Urge to Start by Updating Your CV
First, resist the natural urge to update your CV/Resume.
Updating your resume is a reflex action. Perhaps counterintuitively, please put this project on the side for now and focus on tuning in to you. It’s time to assess what might fit you at this stage of your life and career. You have significant accumulated wisdom and a broad set of experience-generated skills.
Give yourself some grace time to plot or design your “next” versus reflexively looking for a job. If you’re like many of my fifty-something clients, they know they want to do something different; they’re just not sure what that might be. Here’s an (abbreviated) overview of my career refresh process to help you solve this problem.
A Process to Jump-Start Finding Your Next Career Step
1. To start generating ideas, look inward first.
I encourage my career coaching clients to spend some time in what I call “Self-Discovery” mode. In this stage, we run a series of exercises to help individuals tune in to their strengths, interests, histories, and best-self moments. One exercise–your best self–is a great way to jump-start idea generations. Here’s how to run a best-self exercise:
Find some quiet time and write or type the following question: What are the moments in my life where I’ve been at my best as a person? As a professional?
Some individuals initially claim that they can’t think of those moments. I encourage you to think about the tough times you navigated; a struggling team, a failing project, a moment of crisis at work or in your personal life, and jot down your answers to the following questions:
- What are the situations when I’ve been at my best?
- What role did I play?
- What type of people was I around?
- What did I bring to the situation?
- What was the outcome?
Working with a partner or swim buddy, mine the examples for common themes. One client discovered she was at her best, helping, in her words, “underdogs who weren’t getting a fair shot.” Her focus on this was visible from childhood through her successful career helping turn around struggling teams. Another individual recognized that a crisis of any form–personal or professional–brought out the best in him.
Working with your partner, ask and answer: What roles do my best-self examples point to for me? Use these as the start of your Big Idea List.
Grow Your Unfiltered Big Idea List
If the goal is to shift to somewhere fresh, the next step is to generate ideas. I put clients through an extensive ideation process that challenges them to go wide with divergent thinking. This is unfiltered brainstorming. Aim for at least 40 ideas or more. Mine your early life for things you thought you wanted to do. Don’t worry about the viability or practicality of the ideas. No self-censoring allowed. Just brainstorm. Ideally, recruit someone to help.
Best Practice: go analog here and post your ideas via sticky notes on a wall where you can come back, jump, build, organize, and add to them. I’m a big fan of the need for visual cues to support brainstorming. Let your partner add to your Big Idea List as well.
Brainstorming is Important; Filtering is Essential
As your brainstorming runs out of energy, it’s time to impose more rigor on your process. I guide clients through an exciting exercise to identify and weight their life-stage filters. These are the criteria that any new career step must meet to move forward. An abbreviated form of the process is as follows:
Identify the filters essential for you at this life stage. Consider:
- Income needs
- Geographic location
- Fit with purpose
- Fit with values
- Meets your definition of work-life balance
- Leverages your superpowers
- Fits with your best self
- Excites you
- You have or can acquire the skills
- Allows to meet your income needs
And so forth. Identify those filters most vital to you.
Searching for the Top Ideas to Move to the Next Stage
I use a five-point scale to establish a weight for each filter where one is low, and five is high. I also assess each idea for each filter with a one to five score. You end up evaluating “Run a hot dog stand” across all your filters, multiplying the two numbers together to create a cell score. Sum the products for each idea and then compare. (If you want help with this step, drop me a note.)
Now it’s time to evaluate your ideas from your Big Idea List against your life-stage filters. While this exercise has a degree of subjectivity, the goal isn’t the final answer but pointers a few ideas that merit more exploration and possible experimentation. A spreadsheet is an ideal tool for this exercise, and I recommend challenging yourself to down-select up to three ideas.
Work with your partner who can help you assess the quality and weighting of your life stage filters. This is an iterative, creative exercise.
Explore and then Experiment.
A theme I hear from almost all of my fifty-something career shift clients is the need not to invite financial strain or risk into their lives. We get that, and no one said you have to jump off a financial cliff to make a career change. Once you have your candidate ideas, it’s time to explore and potentially experiment before deciding which fits best at this life stage.
To explore possible ideas, I encourage individuals to get away from the computer screen and engage with individuals or groups who have firsthand knowledge of the target idea. From checking in with industry associations to firsthand observation and interviews with individuals in the role or business, gaining real-world insights is imperative. Work hard to identify the key questions and keep notes as you research.
If an idea seems interesting after your exploration phase, it’s time for an experiment. For some, this involves developing a side hustle to test viability and enjoyment. For others, it’s finally tuning that resume and seeking interviews in target organizations for the right roles. I always like to remind clients of the example, “If you think you want to open a hot dog stand, go get a job at one for a week or two and see if the reality matches the fantasy.”
Think through what shape or form your experiment can take to give you the insights you need to evaluate your idea. There’s an art and science to developing suitable hypotheses and testing your ideas. Remember, the goal is to gain insights to make a good choice while minimizing or mitigating the risks you are concerned about in making a change.
If your ideas don’t pass the explore or experimentation phase, return to your Big Idea List and repeat the above process for filtering and assessment.
Make the change at your pace.
Rarely, I find someone who leaps into their new role at the end of the above process. I don’t encourage it. You should build a timetable that meets your needs. It could be saving enough money to cover start-up costs or compensate for the initial lost income. Or, it’s a responsibility, such as having your child complete college. One client wanted to complete a big project in their current job before moving on to new adventures.
The post-experiment phase is ideal for business and life planning. Make sure your significant other is on board. As needed, attend training to shore up your skills. Build a marketing plan for your launch. And make sure your capital needs are satisfied.
The Bottom Line for Now:
If a fresh adventure is important to you, the work doesn’t start by updating your resume. While I’ve shared the abbreviated version of a rigorous process above, the order of events for everyone is as follows: Tune in to you, ideate, filter for fit, explore, experiment, decide, and prepare. Skip these steps, and you invite unwanted risk to your career shift party.
Wishing you success with your important career shift project!
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If you want help to jump-start finding your “next” in your career, check out the Six-Hour Career Energize program. If you want to discuss one-on-one coaching for your career initiative, drop Art a note.
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