Working when you're more than 50?

New prospects for working beyond the age of 50

Working when you’re more than 50? What sort of a question is that?

Life expectancy is increasing all over the Western world.

In Italy and elsewhere in Europe the public purse is struggling to pay pensions.

As a result people’s working lives are also getting longer.

This also applies for the United States, that in many senses we see as the land of dreams. There are problems there too... I recently read a very interesting article about job opportunities for people aged more than 50.

I’ve been working for years as an outplacement consultant supporting people at a medium-high level who are leaving large companies or multinationals as a result of restructuring or strategy changes.
I also work as a career coach with people who are looking for new inspiration, new challenges and new satisfactions later on in their lives.

So I am well acquainted with the issue. Indeed, I also embarked on a career change, even before I turned 50. 

You could say I was a precursor of this trend.

It is quite fair to consider this a trend. More and more people are working on a freelance basis - maybe not youngsters or medium level workers, but it’s certainly the way it is for over 50s and has been the case for quite some while! I’d say this is been the norm for 10 or 15 years, since I have been passionately doing my current job.

What can you do when you’re 50?

First of all you can afford to follow your passion, your inclination, if the conditions around you are right. If you have a home, family, good health and your kids are sorted, etc. 

Speak up! But what does that mean in practice?

The article, which applies to US, which I will adapt for Italian purposes, mentions three possibilities.

Parlaying your experience into a consulting role can be a fantastic way to achieve a greater degree of work-life balance (a top reason for career change for professionals in their late 40s and 50s). The ability to work with a vast array of clients, and have a set duration to projects can be a real blessing if you’ve spent a long period of time in the trenches at a particular organization.

– Anish Majumdar

To become a consultant you need to identify an area of specialisation, which can be a market, a role or some combination of these things. Let me tell you, that might seem simple but it’s not, because you couldn’t just say, for example, that you are "bank specialist". You need to think carefully about your skills and experiences and see how you can translate these into something that is appealing for the market, or a company, albeit a different one to the company you worked in as an employee.

For example: you might be a bank manager and your job involves assessing
companies for approving overdrafts. What would you do if you become a consultant? You could reach out to SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and talk
about business plans and optimising sources of finance. But it’s no good just
talking about it, you need to be able to do it in practice … By writing an Excel spreadsheet and if your reports used to do that for you, you need to be able to do it yourself now. Maybe you could do a course and … not be ashamed about this because you won’t get too far otherwise. I talked about someone making this transition in another post.

You could also make the opposite step.

How? 

There might be a client you work for that is a source of interesting work and perhaps a long-term opportunity is available in the company, so why not think about it? 

I’ve met a number of people who became consultants and then went back to working for companies years later.

This idea should also be helpful for people who unwittingly find themselves in the role of consultants because the market temporarily forced them out and there were no full-time positions that were of interest to them.

The flip-side should also be considered: if you’ve spent a long period of time working as a consultant, the appeal of the “have gun, will travel” lifecycle may be wearing a bit thin. Why not take a close look at the client relationships you’ve built over the years and see if there’s an opening to move into a permanent role with one of them?

– Anish Majumdar

If your goal has always been to reach a certain seniority level at your current company (ex. Managing Director), now is the time to make this OVERT. Set up a meeting with your immediate supervisor and lay out a plan for how you’d like to get there. Enlist this person as an active ally. Regularly check in to make sure they understand what you’re doing to reach this goal. The time for sowing is over…it’s time to harvest your hard-earned experience to finally reach that milestone.

– Anish Majumdar

You’re doing well in a company, you’ve put in a lot of effort, but you still haven’t asked for anything … 

That’s unlikely if you’re a man:), because men tend to ask – it’s only women who find it hard to speak up. 

In any case, without making this a gender issue, it could be that you simply have never explicitly stated your desire to be in a certain position. You might not expect to be the Managing Director, but you might have your eye on the position immediately above yours, and you might even have covered this role for short periods of time when your boss was away.

Just go for it? That’s not what I’m saying. But by thinking about things well and preparing in the right manner you can try to make a stride forward in your company, without turning your whole life upside down and looking for a job elsewhere. A career coach to help you think about what could be done and how to achieve it. At Goodgoing! this is what we do very often, because one of the various options for improving your professional life is making a move in your own company, either upwards or sideways.

Platforms like LinkedIn are incredible gifts to ambitious senior professionals, because it is truly a marketplace where the best ideas and tactics win. You don’t need to speak the secret code to get in — you just need to engage from a place of authenticity and depth. Start regularly sharing content and opinions via LinkedIn Status Updates, Blog Posts, and other venues. Carefully analyze which posts strike the greatest chords with your network, and emphasize them moving forward. You’ll see an immediate uptick in “passive attention” which is another way of saying opportunities (to speak, to consult, to discuss new business opportunities) that come to you without direct outreach. This is an expressway towards creating a unique niche for yourself.

– Anish Majumdar

Anish highlights LinkedIn’s power for identifying a market niche that is aligned with your skills and your network and for creating a reputation as an expert - or “guru”? - in a particular area. Certainly, it’s going to take some time and a strategy to develop a reputation on the web and make a name for yourself which can then be used to set up a consultancy business. But if you don’t try you’ll never know, don’t you agree? So get going immediately! Don’t just follow your own network, trying to look for leading people in your market or the market you want to work in.