Career Change after 50 – here are 7 mistakes to avoid in planning a career change.
A career change after 50, can sometimes feel like a jump into the unknown. But you are not alone, many people just like you, during their working lifetime change careers not once but many times.
To reinvent yourself, and change careers after 50, you must be aware of a number of things to avoid and not make these mistakes in your career transition.
1. Failure to Plan the Move: Career planning after 50 is a must. It allows you to build your skills and qualifications. If you need relevant experience you plan activities that will give you the requisite credentials.
Planning your career gives you a significant advantage over the person who stumbles from job to job and career to career.
Career planning should have positive actions done on a regular basis. Your career planning should have an active financial component. The career plan will have built in flexibility to give you the required road map to the planned career change.
2. Deciding to change careers for the wrong reasons: Take a good look in the mirror. Are you really burned out? Is your boss really a tyrant or is it the demands of the business? Is there something else in your life that you are dissatisfied with and not really your career? Have you done everything you can to resolve the problems at work?
Moving to another career and bringing your personal baggage with you will not resolve your problems.
3. Not assessing your interests, skills and passion: You move to another career because of suggestions of friends or relatives or because the job is available will not get it done.
Self-assessment is the key to finding the right career, where you’ll be challenged and have a passion to going into work everyday.
4. Not doing a due diligence study of the new career: Career research requires developing a great deal of information, talking to a lot of people and getting advice from a variety of sources.
You’ll get to a number of dead ends; this is good as it allows you to reject a career. With a careful analysis of your interests, likes and dislikes there are plenty of career avenues to explore.
5. Not looking carefully at transferable skills: Rejecting the perfect fit for a career change because you do not carefully consider how long built up skills are transferable to satisfy qualifications in the planned new career is a critical mistake.
Skills like project management, leadership, and communication with a bit of work will match up with the requirements of many new careers.
6. Not developing all viable options on the career change: To often a promising career is quickly rejected because a mandatory qualification would take to long to acquire or the first option reveals that it is impossible to fit the learning into your schedule.
For example, if some technical knowledge is required it can be learned through self-study, taking an evening course at a local college, internet learning or taught by a mentor. Other education and learning can be acquired other than through formal class work. Seminars, workshops, and trade shows are other alternatives to pick up the required learning.
Other required experience can be acquired through volunteer work with a non-profit, part-time work, working on committees with a career related organization and even working on project related teams at your current employer.
7. Expecting Instant Results: Unfortunately we live in a society where everything is desired now, not tomorrow or next week, but now.
Effective career planning, on the other hand, is like building a large house. A carefully built foundation will determine the final results. Failure to consider early on, for example, the heating and cooling requirements could result in a home cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Careful planning is the key.
Career planning after 50 is clearly not an exact science. It is however, a method, if done consistently and diligently over time, with time taken occasionally to adjust the career direction, should result in a career change moving you into your dream career.
