The trials and tribulations of searching for a new career trajectory in your 50s

About six months before I was laid off from my last job, I had mentioned to select friends and colleagues that I was getting “a little bored” after about a decade in this particular corporate engagement space. To my surprise, the majority of them (they were all my age plus or minus 10 years) felt the same way, you could say they were also “bored and locked in”. This was from  both business professionals as well as academics. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised - after all it is just human nature. It seems we've all gotten so specialized that the expectation is to continue to be specialized - just in adjacent areas. So, is making a jump to a new area “adjacent+++” difficult? After all, you're just applying fundamental learning, organizing, communications, and people skills developed over decades, in a new domain right?

Now, it could be me being naive, it could be the anomalously uncertain times (spurred on by certain political factors) that are causing hiring managers to wait and see what happens, it could be companies looking exclusively for lateral hires from their competitors who can hit the ground running. It's likely all of the above with who knows what weights are applied to each factor. I started looking. I did see that most senior level positions were very narrowly defined with 10-15+ years in a very specific domain. People who have worked at a large consulting firm for 5-10 years were generally welcome to apply. I was not. People with professional engineering certifications were welcome in anything civil engineering related - makes sense - I don't design the sort of hings that will kill people if they failed. Sales - I guess I can do that? I'm not really a sales person, but I can build partnerships and ecosystems. Lots of software management and engineering type jobs. I'm not a software person (though I did recently read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford - on the recommendation of a colleague. If you didn't think software management was exciting or had no drama, this may change your mind!). 

I talked to lots of people (lots of coffee and lunch which was fun!) and sent out even more applications. I was invited to two interviews (one at a regional university - not sure what happened but I guess I wasn't a good fit for them? and another which was a company doing stuff which I had a strong background in, but they wanted a strong salesperson. I started seeing jobs in non-profits - and I really liked the impact factor. They paid about one-third to half of what the for-profit sector paid, but here, it seemed that I could make a difference in someone's life - not just help the bottom line. I do some volunteer board work for two non-profits and enjoy that, but maybe that is because they don't pay me to stress out over deadlines.  I admire those who work at small non-profits - and wonder how partnerships can be built with larger institutions in a more productive ecosystem. I have ideas…

In the mean time, I do some work around the house, learning to play the piano and sing at the same time, walk the dog to the dog park social group (one of my “Third places” - and I maintain interest by doing things like hosting a slide show of my recent trip to Nigeria), work out and socialize at the gym, work on my consulting company's business plans (InverseOutsights), and continue to find leads. I've also started talking to some folks about the option of buying a franchise. A friend of mine who lives outside Boston bought an industrial adhesives company, and he seems to be doing well. I've been following some of these online (Helen Guo at SMB Deal Hunter), and talking to a few others about options. This was not really on my radar before but it's an intriguing path to consider. They have you take some kind of personality assessment (and it seems uncannily accurate - though I'm not sure if I'm falling for some fortune teller type ruse), and use that to narrow down the type of company they make referrals for. There is a slight conflict of interest as they only get paid when you buy a business, but so far there's been no hard selling of this). Anyways, that's enough for the second post.