http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html Midlife Career change blog en-us career change Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:39:25 GMT Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:39:25 GMT midlife-career-change.com http://www.midlife-career-change.com/Career-Change-Questions-and-Answers.html Career Change Questions and Answers Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:29:40 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/new-career-in-medical-field.html Q and A: A New Career in the Medical Field? Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:21:07 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-resume-cv-tips.html Career Change Resume Tips Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:41:09 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#Career-heartbreak? Do you remember the first time your heart was broken. Did you tell yourself, or did somebody else say You were too good for him / she was out of your league / there are plenty more fish in the sea? And yet, you couldnt put your first love out of your mind. Ill bet you can conjure up a picture of that person right now, no matter how many years have passed. Somewhere hidden deep in your heart is a feeling almost as strong, that perhaps you have buried the same way. You wanted to do something, perhaps spectacular and wonderful, or perhaps quite ordinary, but were told you are too short / tall / squeamish / bad at spelling to do that you are good at so many other things, why not do this instead?. And you gave up your first love, to do what somebody else thought you should do with your life. Maybe this person was your teacher or your parents, and you were only a child, so you believed and respected their opinion. After all you were very small, and they were big, grown up and an authority figure. But now you are bigger, grown up and an authority on your own life. Remember your first love, and decide for yourself - what should you do with your own life? Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:12:58 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/recommended_books.html Books for Career Change and Job Hunting Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:27:04 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#Is-your-career-a-workaround? Workarounds The computer industry's answer to quality dont fix it, find another way to use the product that lets you get to the desired result, even though it takes longer, is more complicated and is not using the logical process of the software. Customers get used to using the workaround, then the software is updated and the workaround no longer works So why do we tolerate it? Lack of choice, once you have invested all the time and effort selecting, purchasing and then learning how to use a software package, you dont want to go through that pain again, and live without what functionality you have in the interim. Meanwhile, the workarounds may cumulatively steal more time over the lifetime of this version than would have been lost if you changed. But it is small doses of pain, compared to a big dose. Is this how you are living your life, or managing in your current job, or career? How much pain will it cost to change, and will this add up to less pain than the workarounds you put up with now? Sat, 05 Jan 2008 14:12:09 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/are-you-ready-to-change-career.html Before you make a decision on changing career, ask yourself these questions. Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:36:24 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/Interview-Tips.html "Who is the perfect person for this job? What knowledge, skills, personality traits would you require or expect them to have?" Once the interviewer(s) have described this hypothetical person, demonstrate how you fit the requirements, where you can offer more, and in the cases where you are not a perfect fit, why your skills and abilities may be more useful (if you still want the job, of course). "How long have you worked here? What is the average length of time people stay here?" (The staff turnover rate) A good employer will not find it offensive to answer this it tells you whether this is a career opportunity or a stopover on the way to your destination. Unless you like hanging around airports, or genuinely want to spend some time exploring a destination along the way, try to get a direct flight! "How many jobs have you had here?" This will give you an idea of how good the organization is at facilitating your career growth. "How many people in your department have been promoted on your recommendation to management levels/salary scales above yours?" This will help you to understand how well your potential boss facilitates the career advancement of his team. "May I speak to each of the other team members, individually, one-to-one?" This will help you get a feel for the team members and how they feel about their manager/supervisor and each other, what their career aspirations are and how you will fit in to the team (or not!). A good manager will have no problem with this request, and you will quickly be warned off if you detect a negative bias in the team towards the company, the boss, or other team members. Alternatively, this may offer an opportunity if you feel you have strong people skills and would like the challenge of motivating a team, bridging broken relationships and facilitating positive, constructive, open and honest communication that empower each member of the team, including the manager/supervisor with that win-win positive glow. Good luck if this is you! Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:20:21 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/investigating-job-market-trends.html When choosing your new career, you will need to be aware of not only what is happening now in the job market but what has happened over the past few years, and what these trends suggest is likely to happen in the future. If you are changing career because you were made redundant, and there a few jobs available in your current career (or few that will pay you the salary you need) then you will probably not want to be in this same situation again in a decade. You will be older and wiser, but possibly less employable, unless attitudes to older workers change significantly. With the pace of change in technology and globalization of commerce, it is probable that many career choices that look appealing now will be gone with the winds of change in a few short years. So what factors should you consider? You wouldnt buy shares in a company just because the share price was low (or high!). You only buy shares if you have reason to believe the shares will increase in value. Likewise with choosing your career. What are the market forces that will shape the future economics of your career choice? Will the customers of your career product be getting richer, younger, further away, more educated, fitter, fatter, healthier, better informed, unemployed, out of jail? How will this affect the future value of your career? Will it make you more employable (and therefore richer)? More capable of coping with the technological, sociological, political and climate changes ahead (and therefore happier)? Sun, 02 Dec 2007 22:43:06 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com No job is secure. Economies are always changing unpredictably. Do not be fooled by *economic experts* predictions genuine economic experts will be the first to admit that it easier to accurately predict the weather. New technologies sweep aside entire industries how many blacksmiths, typesetters, coopers, cobblers or wool spinners do you know? Social and political changes have unforeseeable economic consequences. Your own successful, thriving, growing business may be squashed by hyperinflation. I know because this happened to me in 1996 in Zimbabwe. New regulations or a big bad (or small smart) competitor who is not playing by the old rules may force you out of your current business. People are made redundant by companies that have sworn never to lay off their human capital. It has happened before. This happened to me, and many others in the IT industry I was made redundant in 2004. And it will happen again, and again, in this and other industries, locally and globally, ad nauseum. So let me repeat it once more, just so that you are perfectly clear about the message Your job is not secure. The flip side: There is always opportunity to find a new career that never existed before, that is a better fit for you than your current career. There are always new and exciting opportunities emerging out of the changes in technology and the global economy. How many programmers, web designers and internet entrepreneurs do you know? Think about the experience you are getting in your current job. Will it be useful to you in 5, 10, 20 years? Put my money where my mouth is: Im learning about biology not something that will be changing because of legislation, technology, globalization or any other market force. Charles Darwins theory of evolution is as useful today as when he first published it. Louis Pasteurs discoveries are still relevant and continue to be applied today. When I learn or discover something this year, it should still be true in ten years. If you cannot say the same about what you are learning today, this may or may not be a problem. If your current learning is a step in a natural progression that you desire, then you are heading in your chosen direction. If what you are learning now is a dead end and will only apply to this job, for a limited time, and is not a foundation to build upon, then rethink your career choice now. Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:56:18 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/be-prepared-for-redundancy.html 10 tips to help you be prepared for a layoff Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:53:39 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/predicting_layoff.html Tips for predicting redundancy Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:31:06 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#Care-about-your-career? What do you care about? The answer to this question will tell you in which industry or sector you should be working to give your career meaning and help keep you self motivated. Some examples: you may care about protecting the environment; helping the underprivileged; providing medical care to sick children; maintaining wildlife diversity; educating retired people on their statutory rights; or spreading your religion to the whole world. This doesnt mean that you will necessarily have to change career. If you are an accountant, and like being an accountant, but you want to do something to help protect the environment, you can work as an accountant for the EPA. If you decide that you want to change from being an accountant to being an environmental scientist, then you will have access to environmental scientists who will be able to point you in the right direction for training, mentoring and who will be able to explain exactly what it is they do all day. You may decide to stay an accountant once you have a realistic close up look at the career of an environmental scientist, and feel you will be better suited to helping the environment doing what you have experience, training and skill at doing. Or you may realize that you were meant to be a scientist, and that you have learned a lot of useful and important skills that will transfer very well to your new career: your grasp of statistics, eye for detail and process, nose for sniffing out solutions to tricky complex convoluted problems, and your ability to work with a wide variety of people at different levels of an organization. Only you know what you really care about, and nobody can teach you care about anything that you dont care about. I have often said that I could teach a monkey to fix a computer, but Im not sure that I could get him to care enough to really be any good. Do you want to be a monkey? Neither do I - thats why I chose a career that allows me to do what I care about, every day. It helps to get through those days where the work is not exactly as satisfying as youd wished, when you are doing stuff that youd really rather leave till tomorrow. Caring about the end result and reason for your work is the motivation to do the inevitable stuff that is not fun, not recognized or rewarded, boring or unpleasant. Caring will help you to get on with it with a smile in your heart, if not on your face! Wed, 03 Oct 2007 07:37:02 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#Change-your-careers-diaper? As any parent or babysitter is aware, changing a diaper is not a pleasant task that they look forward to with gleeful anticipation. Yet it is a task that any loving parent does for the welfare and comfort of their baby. When Lily, our baby daughter, has to have her diaper changed, Brenda or I do it without complaint in our hearts nor on our lips. Of course, there is no choice really, so we might as well get on with it without complaining. Every morning I unwillingly participate in traffic. But I have chosen almost every aspect of my current lifestyle, so why dont I do something about it? What are the options? 1. Bus: There are two buses a day through Corrandulla, one at 11:00, the other at 13:30. 2. Cycle: I would gladly cycle were there a cycle track, or even a verge on the road. But I dare not risk it. - most drivers insist on speeding down this narrow stretch of road at or above the speed limit of sixty miles an hour, desperate to overtake so they can be first in the queue of stopped traffic a few miles further on. 3. Drive at a different time: I try to avoid the worst of the traffic by driving before the rush hour starts cutting the potential hour long trip to twenty minutes. 4. Boat: Im considering buying a small boat and commuting via the Corribh lake and river. It would be about an hour, but what a stress free hour! However in the dark windy winter mornings and evenings, this may be a seasonal option only. 5. Move house: We really like our house, and we cannot afford to move to a village closer to Galway that might be safer for cycling or have better public transport. 6. Change job or career: I really care about this career and I love where Im working right now. Perhaps once Ive finished my PhD more options will become available, but for the next two years, here is where we are going to stay, and traffic is going to be a daily experience. I have willingly made some compromises about where I live, and how I get to work. So Ill put up with the traffic for all the other benefits I get from my job and career. Ill probably never enjoy driving in traffic, but Im doing my best to change my attitude towards it this is something I can control. I try to look for the good, courteous and careful people sharing the road, and try to overlook the behavior of the rest. After all, its not like changing a real stinker of a diaper. Can you think of a career youd care about enough to gladly put up with changing its diaper? Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:39:51 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#Getting-things-done-at-work Today got off to a slow start - I woke up late. I wrestled with the University's self registration tool to renew annual registration for PhD students for half an hour before I gave up and went for coffee. Most of the morning was spent between the admissions office and my desk sorting it out - too much time gone on a task that I thought would take half an hour. Somehow I managed to forget that I had to refill the plastics cupboard and help clean up primary tissue culture, so there went the afternoon. So the lab work I had planned to do today will not happen till Monday. I managed to laugh it off, though I'm starting to feel the (self applied) pressure building to achieve some results with my research. Which brings me to the topic - getting things done at work! Some days are like this, where plans are scuppered by the unexpected, or things that should have been planned for pop up as urgent tasks. What can you do but sigh and hope it doesn't happen again? No! Learn from the experience and try to pre-empt it re-occurring. I've added the Friday plastics restock and primary room clean up to my scheduler. I'll keep trying every day to achieve some step(s) towards my goals, but I'll accept that some things are not foreseeable and will delay immediate plans. Likewise though, some tasks take less time than originally planned, so instead of wasting the "spare" time generated, I'll make the effort to use it productively on what I care about. Flexibility and patience are important, while keeping a clear vision and balanced perspective of how you are progressing towards your chosen goals in life. Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:50:42 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#What-happens-when-an-irresistible-force-meets-an-immovable-objector? There are two types of people at work. Those who do the work The Workers. And those attending the workplace The Attendants. Attendants may arrive on time, perhaps even early, they go to the meetings, they wear the correct dress code for the job, often they work late, and the job appears to get done. If they are in certain types of job, where promotion is based on the number of years sitting in a chair, they will automatically be promoted, ever upwards, continuing to fuel the mediocrity of the organization in which they dwell. Years go by, and they retire, and look back and wonder why they bothered. Maybe a lot of other people wonder too. The Workers, on the other hand, are driven towards a goal, dragging the Attendants along behind, who are usually kicking and screaming, objecting and pointing out that this is not how weve always done it and this wont work because A, B, C. The Workers have an internal drive seemingly forcing them in this direction, giving them boundless energy. They are irresistible forces. The Attendants, meanwhile, have huge inertia, welding them to the spot. They are immovable objects, or maybe immovable objectors would be a more apt description. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable objector? The immovable objector gets left behind, and the irresistible force moves on. You and I have the potential to be either, and many of us have been both (not at the same of course) at various times in each of our careers. You or I can learn to do any job, but nobody can teach us how to care about that job. That must come, and can only come from within. This website is all about my personal journey to discovering what I care about. Hopefully it will encourage you to find what you care about, and find a way to make a living out of it in a place where you will have other people around you who care about the same things. That way you can get the important and meaningful things done. Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:51:15 GMT http://www.midlife-career-change.com/career-change-blog.html#Thinking-about-changing-career Are you thinking about changing career, but have no clue what you might want to do? I was in exactly the same situation, several times over my past career. I tried changing jobs while staying in the same career - as a computer technician. My training had been in electronics and telecommunications, working for a mid sized computer company that serviced and repaired pc's through to minicomputers. I had several jobs doing pretty much the same thing but for different computer companies, or non-computer companies, including a car and truck dealership and a retail/wholesale/transport company. I changed country several times, moving from Zimbabwe to Botswana and back, then to Ireland, The Netherlands, New Zealand and back to the Netherlands, searching for something that was within me all the time, but that I couldn't find. I tried self employment, running my own computer business for three years in Zimbabwe's crashing economy, before I quit there for good in 1997. I tried sideways career changes, staying in the computer industry, but writing software instead of fixing hardware, IT Management, and Project Management of software and hardware testing. It was only when I sat down one day and wrote down all the things that I enjoyed about my various jobs over the years, and what I felt I was good at, that I started to get an inkling of what to do next. Looking at all I had learned from my career, I decided that my strongest ability, and what I enjoyed most doing was "learning new stuff, and applying it to solve some problem" or often the other way around - "trying to solve a problem, so having to discover new stuff to find a fix". I particularly enjoyed fixing the root cause of the problem so that it would not occur again. In other words, engineering myself out of having to do the job twice. So I started looking at careers where there was a good match to these skills and needs. I tried to keep an open mind, and read through want ads, evening courses and college courses looking for something to spark my interest. Engineering, mathematics, and science kept popping up at me. I needed to find out more... Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:26:54 GMT