Amy Lindgren

Second Sunday Series – Editor’s Note: This is the fourth of 12 columns on making a career change which appear the second Sunday of the month, from September through August. Last month’s column presented 10 ideas for choosing a new career, while the months before offered a sample timeline and questions to consider when changing careers. 

Have you ever wondered how career change in your 60s would compare to changing careers in your 40s or 50s? That’s easy: It’s the same, only different.

The same? Process. No matter your age, you’ll still need to identify the next work and find a way to get started. Different? The steps might be speeded up and the stakes could feel higher. At this stage, you don’t have the same margin for error as when you were younger. For example, while long-term retraining wouldn’t be off the table, it needs to be weighed carefully to ensure the payoff.

It would be hard to estimate how many people make this leap in their seventh decade (or later), partly because the concept of career change gets tangled up with retirement careers, downshifting, and un-retiring. There’s a lot of overlap, which complicates the process of tracking who’s doing what.

What we do know is that America is getting grayer by the minute, while labor shortages, a broader variety of work options, and the ongoing need for income all combine to make work in our later decades more inviting, and sometimes necessary.

If you’re at or approaching this stage, you may have decided to ride out the career you’re in. That can be a reasonable course, but if this plan is a default rather than a choice, there’s an argument for considering a career change.

If that’s the case, here are questions to ask yourself, followed by some tips.

Question 1: Assuming you’re happy in your new career, can you imagine working another five years or more? There’s no rule on this, but planning to stay at least five years in a new field helps justify making a change. On the other hand, if you’re flat-out determined to retire sooner, you might not get a payoff for the effort.

Question 2: If you’re currently unhappy in your work life, do you need a career change or would switching jobs solve the problem? A little research can help confirm your thinking on this, one way or the other. While you don’t want to settle for simply changing jobs, neither do you want to toss out a career based primarily on what’s happening in your current workplace.

Now for the tips (which are really steps), calibrated for older career-changers.

Identify the guiding principle of your career change: People often make work changes based on purpose and wanting to do something with more meaning. That’s a strong guiding principle, and one which can define the next steps: Uncover what purpose means to you, look for places doing that work, etc.

That said, not every late-in-life career change is based on purpose. Other common reasons  include:

• Higher income, allowing for a higher retirement savings

• Work that’s less physical in nature, or less demanding in terms of responsibility

• Something that’s more portable, allowing for remote work while traveling or visiting family

• Work that’s more fun

Leverage your work history to find ideas: A huge advantage for career change in your 60s is having three or four decades of work experience to draw on for ideas. In reviewing past jobs (even if they’re in the field you’re leaving), look for inspiration in aspects of the work that you enjoyed the most.

Along the same lines, you might do a “loop” career change, where you return to a very early job that you enjoyed, probably before you launched on your formal career path. Or perhaps there’s a “path not taken” that still appeals.

Another option is to combine key aspects from different positions you’ve had. Perhaps you enjoyed writing a newsletter in one job and training new workers in another — could your next career involve training and curriculum writing?

Leverage your network to get leads: Once you have a sense of what you might like to do, it’s time to use the other great asset of experienced workers: Your contacts. Even casual outreach to ask what someone might know about a particular field or company can be enough to guide your path until you’re ready to move forward. At that stage, your contacts can come into play again, as the first step in your job search.

Intrigued? Inspired? Come back next month as we continue the Second Sunday series on changing careers.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.