Not retiring: career transition is for everyone
A report out this week from Teach First focused on making the profession more flexible in...read more
As we get older, we may start focusing more on meaningful work so schemes that help people transition to new sectors are vital.
Growing older has a habit of making you focus on what’s important. Things happen in life and more so as you age. You experience all sorts of life stuff – from divorce and breakdowns to bereavement, experiences that tend to concentrate the mind. So it’s not surprising that many older people are keen to do a job that has greater personal meaning for them. That doesn’t mean that younger people are not also interested in meaningful work, but there are often other immediate concerns such as ambition, independence, earnings, proving yourself, etc. Many older people may have also been knuckling down in a job they don’t really like during the years that their children have been growing up.
Middle age is a time of transition, but one which is little acknowledged except in stereotypes about men going off with younger women and so forth. There has been a lot of focus of late on the menopause, after a dearth of information, but this is only one aspect of what is going on. Hopefully, scriptwriters and the like are cottoning on to the rich material – the stuff of life – that older people represent even if there is still a bit of an aversion in some quarters to having older women on screen.
Many older people find themselves at a crossroads career wise too. They may have been made redundant or taken time off to care for a parent or other relative which enables them to think through what they really want from work. Our workingwise.co.uk survey shows that greater work life balance is vital, but so too is the meaning question. Which is where initiatives like Charity Interns are important. They enable older people to change course career-wise. Charity Interns was set up to help older people in the private sector transition to the charity sector.
One of the big barriers may face is lack of experience in the sector. The initiative involves a six-month placement in a charity. It’s small scale at present and, of course, the charitable sector is as buffeted as everywhere else by the economic uncertainty we are facing, if not more so. Yet there is a lot of cross-learning that could be had from having people from different backgrounds in the sector. Corporate social responsibility has become a bigger deal over the last years – in part because employees and candidates increasingly want to see that their employer is giving back. People who have experience of the business sector know the questions businesses will have. Moreover, each sector speaks a slightly different language and so it’s important to have people on board who are able to speak both. Surely, opening up to different ways of thinking can only be a positive for everyone.