Embracing Career Change

Older workers and retirees are changing careers and finding less stress and greater satisfaction. AARP followed workers over-50 for more than a decade to study career changes and find out how they fared. In all, 91 percent of the study group said they enjoyed their new jobs, a significant bump up from 79 percent thumbs up for their old jobs. Already common, career change among older works is likely to grow even more as the baby-boom generation nears retirement age. The study was conducted for AARP by The Urban Institute of Washington and is based on 1,705 workers nationwide who were surveyed over a 14-year period beginning in 1992. The results were released May 7, 2009.

So what does this have to do with those workers who are under 50? You don’t have to wait until you are AARP eligible to pursue your dream career. As one study participant put it: “If you pursue things that interested you when you were younger, who knows where it can lead? You find out that you could actually go into what you got a kick out of all those years.”

Why wait, or if you are currently unemployed this might be the push you need to embrace a career change and follow your dreams. If you don’t like what you are doing, are doing it for the wrong reasons, feel stuck, want a new outlook on life, or just flat out need to find a career to replace your current vanishing career—define your ideal job, develop the need skill and go for it!