Career Change, Is it for a Baby Boomer?
There are fewer worries when you’re a kid. Your parents provide for all your material and emotional needs. As a person grows old, their needs and wants also grow with them. And finally, when they graduate college, it is now time to start a life of their own.
Looking for the right career that is of great interest to you can be quite hard. But if you successfully choose a good career and decide to keep it, you’re life will be worth living.
There are many career paths to take. So before anything else, you should make sure that you’re on the right path. Oftentimes, people end up with a job or career that they are not interested in; they simply manage to push through with it because they need the money.
In today’s hard times, having a good paying job is already enough. You can finance all your expenses, most especially if you have children to support. But if the situation is like this, a time will come when you will finally get tired of doing a work that you’re not interested in.
If you belong in the generation of the baby boomers, you already have a career by now. You’re the type of person who wants to work harder and for longer hours. If you want a career change, it’s never too late. In fact, most of the baby boomers in the workforce are retiring late, and there are still those who change their careers. Most boomers want to continue in contributing or working even after they retire.
It’s common to change a career in your lifetime. You can even find people who changed their careers more than three times. The reason behind this is that they haven’t found yet the right career that they can be satisfied with, and what they love doing. Perhaps they will stop changing careers only after they found what suits their needs and wants.
Confronting a career change for a baby boomer can be a bit difficult. Boomers grew up in a prosperous world, where everything was easy for them to have like education and their material needs. And with today’s competitive market, a baby boomer should be able to compete with other capable people.
It would be better to view a career change as an opportunity to find a better career, one that will suit you best. You should find a job that you love doing and one that you could be satisfied with until you retire from work.
Around 3% of people going through changes in their career are only forced to do so because they were laid-off and about 4.5% just want to explore something else. Undergoing a shift in career will be much easier, enjoyable, and productive if you do a couple of things like:
1. assess your skills and see if it can be used in other jobs 2. money doesn’t matter to most people; so find a job that is meaningful for you, one that you love doing 3. find where your passion lies 4. always be realistic; if your skills doesn’t suit the job, you’re probably better of without it 5. do you want to stay in the profession or do you want a radical change in your career 6. if you’re satisfied with the present company that you belong, perhaps you can ask for re-training 7. don’t mind your age, what’s important is your skills and the things that you can do 8. you can join organizations in the field that you’re interested in
These are just few of the things that you can do before seeking for a new career. Your job experience matters in getting into another career, as well as relevant trainings.
Change is natural. The world changes every day; inventions can happen overnight. But with a career change, you can’t do it with the snap of your finger. You should consider a lot of things like your family, your needs, and other important matters.
Source: Flickr
It’s never too late for baby boomers. You’ve lived your life long enough as a happy-go-lucky individual. It’s time to stick with the realities of life and start working hard in your new-found career.
