WorkWise: Find the bridge to your new career

After age 40, you'll face the greatest challenge of your career if you can't continue in the same path. Lack of imagination gets in the way almost every time as you detail accomplishment after accomplishment on your resume. You think you're doing the right thing, but you haven't found a connection between your old and new career and haven't imagined a new career. What concept is greater than the sum of its parts?

The problem isn't your resume or ageism. It's that you haven't conceptualized where you're going. Even worse, you secretly hope that an employer will recognize how the new you relates to the old. View yourself differently before you research your direction. Follow that with education or training if you need it. Then, increase your competitiveness by updating your marketing skills so you stand out.

LABELS

Get yourself to the starting gate by shedding any labels under which you operate or view yourself. This idea, offered by Nick Kolesnikoff of Empowerment Coach, LLC, in Marstons Mills, Mass., means throwing off the sometimes comfortable shackles of your old career. Resting on familiar occupations, industries and titles will immobilize you in your past, not propel you forward. Dig. Define the core of your old and new career, which you can't do with these artificial boundaries.

Rather than thinking about "reinventing" yourself, take a retrospective inventory of "the things that you keep coming back to," suggests Lisa DeAngelis of Boston's Leading with Values. What have you done over and over? What comments have people made about you? For example, one employer told a man in his early 20s that he smiled only one time, when they discussed the outdoors. Getting to specifics like this is the most important part of your research, because it assures you of having something from your core to take to your future. It sets you up for long-term job satisfaction and professional fulfillment.

DISCUSSIONS

Once you begin to "have a sense of what you might like to do," DeAngelis points out, "you don't need to jump in with both feet. Look for people who do similar types of work. Find out how they got into it, what they enjoy about it and what advice they have." She explains that obtaining this information helps trigger ideas about how to develop a career and the best path to it. It also helps if you like the people. If you don't, start over!

Lisa Wexler, a former attorney, would concur with DeAngelis. By speaking with others, she says that you'll be able to decide whether "you need to (seek) formal education in your next field, whether it be a vocational school or continuing ed." She attended the Connecticut School of Broadcasting to solidify her career-change at 45 and is now the award-winning show host of "The Lisa Wexler Show" on WSTC and WNLK in Norwalk, Conn.

If you've been a lifelong learner, you might find out-of-the-box routes to the education you need, such as enlisting the interest of a leader in your new field who might serve informally as an advisor or reading avidly and listening to tapes about your new field.

At times throughout this process, you might well be afraid of the unknown or unfamiliar. In addition, you'll experience stages of anger and depression. Find a photo or article about someone you admire who's done what you're doing and put it where you'll see it at least once a day. Reach forward to that happiness. When you finally accept your market shift, you'll grieve. Allow yourself to do it. Then, research the market, update your job-hunting skills and make the change.

Dr. Mildred L. Culp welcomes your questions at culp@workwise.net. © 2010 Passage Media.