Finding Work After 50

Age is just a number, until it comes to finding a job.

Losing your job or changing careers later in life can be both terrifying and exciting. There are so many questions; Should I look for work in the same field or should I try something new? Are my tech skills adequate for today’s labour market? Will an employer hire someone like me who’s getting close to retirement age?

Keeping your cool and using some new strategies can make the experience fun and rewarding. You can get the foot in the door by making a few simple tweaks to your resume and modernizing your approach to job search.

Update your email address

If your email is one of the older domains from the 00’s like Yahoo or MSN, consider updating to Gmail or if you have a website, consider using an email address connected to your domain.

Remove years and stale info from your resume

If you graduated high school in ‘82 or college in ’89 you are giving away your age before prospective employers even get a chance to meet you. If you have post secondary education, remove the high school completely. If you only have high school, leave the info but remove the graduating year.

Remove any certificates or micro qualifications that are expired or more than 10 years old. If you are 52 years and your resume still has a babysitting certificate from when you were 15, remove it. Instead focus on courses or certificates that show you have been learning new skills. In fact, during your job search is a great time to update Foodsafe, Serving it Right, First Aid or other certificates that may have expired.

Make sure you exist online

If you haven’t already done it, create a profile somewhere on social media; Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or another platform and start creating a presence for yourself. If you already have an established profile, find a way to mention that in your resume or cover letter. If you admin community Facebook pages, or have a website or are active on Twitter, make sure to mention this too.

Don’t overlook references to webinars, resources, courses or training that you have accessed on the internet. If you did labour market research about the field you are entering, try to slide that into your cover letter or mention it in your interview. Doing so can be a good reflection of your technical skills and your ability to stay current. Employers are generally looking for people who know their way around the internet and social media.

Clean up your act

Employers will Google you and check out your Facebook profile. Remove any pictures and content from social media that reflect you in a unprofessional way This is also a fresh way to promote yourself in ways that a resume can’t. Your political views or comments on social issues can tip the scales in your favour if an employer likes what they see, and vice versa. This is also a good way to sneak in some indicators that you are active and healthy, by posting pics or posts talking about being active or engaged with your community.

Market your value

As soon as you walk into an interview the employer is going to recognize you as an older applicant. While age discrimination is illegal, employers will still sometimes dismiss older people due to prejudice and misconceptions about skill levels and health. Employers may have concerns about older workers’ ability to work long hours, or perform more labour-intensive tasks or their ability to gel with a young team.

Being aware of these potential concerns and turning them into a plus can really disarm a reluctant interviewer.  Think about how your maturity can be marketed. During your work life, you have undoubtedly developed a strong work ethic, reliability, the ability to prioritize tasks and manage your time. Yes, young workers might be adventurous, energetic and ambitious but many mature workers have transferrable skills they have gained through raising a family that those younger workers may not have developed yet; diplomacy, crisis management, team leadership, conflict intervention, budgeting. Consider also that now that you probably no longer have kids at home, your time is much more flexible than a young parent’s, your availability to work shifts or be on call could be very attractive to an employer.

Job search after 50 doesn’t have to be frightening and if you take into account the value of your experience and the wisdom you’ve gained along the way you should be able to find a perfect fit in no time.

What is Labour Market Research?

Job seekers will often struggle with knowing where to start looking for work. Going online and searching listings to see what jobs are available in town then sending off resumes is usually about as far as most people go. But doing some further investigation can answer a lot of questions and help make informed decisions to ensure your career is heading in the right direction.

Labour Market Research will tell you not only who is hiring, but can also tell you what to expect for wages, advancement policies, benefits, and job expectations.  Labour Market Research will tell you if the company runs shifts, if employees are expected to be on call, or if the work is seasonal. You can find out what skills you will need to enter a new position, qualifications or certificates you might need, where you can get any required training, and how much it will cost for that training.  

Depending on the information available, you may be able to learn about how the company interacts with community service agencies, other offices or factories they may operate or how the company gives to charity.

This type of in-depth research can really give you a step up in an interview if you mention that you have researched the company and you are already familiar with their hiring practices, policies, mandates or mission statement.  

The more informed you are, the better decisions you can make for yourself and your prospective employer, saving time and frustration for you both.

DUMB Goals

Having a goal, possessing a sense of direction, gives us meaning in our lives. This meaning validates our existence and gives us a sense of worth. It gives us hope for the future and a belief that we can achieve our goals.

But what about the practice of setting goals? What methods should we apply? What is the most effective way of accomplishing our goals? Systems people tell us that goals need to be SMART. That is the acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. There are variations on this theme, but SMART goals are what Career Development Practitioners (CDPs) are taught in school in order to assist people in returning to work. CDPs often work for employment programs with measurable outcomes, so they need to be realistic about the goals of their clients.

“If the goal is uninteresting to you, why would you follow it? Surely it needs to motivate you every day. There must be a reason to follow this direction. It has to drive you onward.”

Goals, we are taught, should be specific. They need to be clearly defined with concrete terms associated with them. A goal needs to be an accurate picture. We should be able to measure that goal. It is important to develop a quantitative measurement. “We are what we measure,” is the battle cry of evaluators everywhere. The goal must be achievable. Is it within my grasp? Do I possess the resources to achieve it? That means the goal needs to be realistic. Realistic means that it should be pragmatic, within my scope and not detached from reality in any way. Finally, the goal needs a timeline and be organized through a series of specific time measurements.

As a student I reflected on these SMART goals thinking about how structured it all felt. I worried about specificity. What is the goal? When will it be accomplished? When would it take place? I was also really uncomfortable with this idea of realistic. It comes down to whose reality we are talking about. Over my 28 years of working as a CDP I have met many people who tell me that their friends, parents, teachers have told them they need to be realistic about their futures. I ask them what that means. They usually describe a job that is local, low paid and easy to get. These jobs are realistic. But so are jobs in every field of work on the planet. How do people get jobs collecting bugs in rainforests or steering rafts down great rivers? Or for that matter how do people find their bliss, their raison d’etre. They dared to dream. They are people who have followed their vision and is a reality for millions of workers engaged in work that brings them joy and satisfaction.

It occurred to me that none of the goals that I had achieved in my life had followed the SMART methodology. I started to see the SMART acronym in a different light: Sensible, Mediocre, Adequate, Regular and Tedious. I couldn’t see where the imagination, dreams, excitement were involved. I was missing the sense of play and enjoyment.

I thought I need my own acronym for goals. So, I came up with Dynamic, Unlimited, Motivating and Bold, or DUMB. When we look at concepts like Krumboltz’s Planned Happenstance, we start to recognize the need for dynamism. Krumboltz said that it is important to have a goal but that it was equally important to be able to change it when better opportunities come along. It is important to determine a direction but also to be prepared to follow a new direction as we learn more information.

When we think of a goal, we start to look at it like a line from the present to the future, completing a series of objectives to achieve the outcome. This linear approach causes us to miss the many new opportunities that may arise on the journey. So it may be more useful to think of goal setting in a web-like shape, with points of connection rather than a line with a terminus. We need to develop goals that are unlimited rather than closed.

If the goal is uninteresting to you, why would you follow it? Surely it needs to motivate you every day. There must be a reason to follow this direction. It has to drive you onward.

I use the term bold to encompass an idea that is tied to goal success. The question we must ask when undertaking a new goal is: What will be different when I achieve this goal? Without this, there is little point in undertaking change. Research has shown outcomes are achieved by people who envision a different state, that the goal has improved a situation, that a new condition has been brought into being. It needs to be seen as bold and different.

I’m not sure the DUMB acronym will catch on. It is designed to rail against a nice neat methodology, rather than the messy, complex nature of existence. Maybe the truth is that we are smart when we know our limitations and weaknesses.

Maybe “Half of being smart is knowing what you are dumb about.”

These are the words of a science-fiction character, Daniel Foreman. Foreman is characterized by writer, David Gerrold as a trainer who teaches people to achieve their potential in their fight against the alien species called the Chtorr. Foreman helps people to adapt their mode to best fight the aliens.

Could there be a metaphor in there? But I digress. Back to goals.

Back in 2003 a group of scientists determined the power of imagination is largely responsible for “human motivation and goal-directed behaviour.”

The Study by Arana, Parkinson (et al) asked a group to make decisions about food listed in menus that were based on their likes and dislikes. The researchers noticed that the parts of the brain that fired were the same in most cases. They saw that the imagination neurons were firing at the same time as the motivation neurons.

So, if the imagination is important in our motivation, then shouldn’t we be talking to our friends and family about our dreams and not what is “realistic”?

Goal setting is a messy business. We need to embrace that the complexity and variation in our existence plays a role in what we choose to engage in. Having a goal will take us to new vistas that we never knew existed. It’s in among that landscape where we will discover places that we had never envisioned.