Causes of A Career Change In Mid Life, And The Choices On Offer For A Fresh Start

There was a time when somebody set their sights on a given career path while still at school, undertook the required training, and subsequently remained in that area up to retirement. The situation has altered since then, with more and more people switching to a different profession later in life. Clearly the more advanced in years they are, the tougher it may be to switch to working in a different way, yet on the other hand, they will possibly possess more capital to assist in tiding them over a probable temporary fall in pay that career change brings about. The emergent field of Internet business has created a new type of online jobs, that those from numerous previous occupations can adjust to easily, especially because they allow people to work from home.

There are perhaps various causes leading people to take a change of career. Some people may have been pushed by their parents into taking up a given line of work, for example, sons might be expected to follow a family tradition of being a lawyer or doctor. It may not, though, be something they really enjoy doing, so later on, they may decide break away and re-train for the profession they really hope to pursue. For some the strategy is to take up a secure day job, and indulge their genuine area of interest – in antiques or theatre, for example – in the evening. In the rare cases where they become successful, they are free to leave behind their less glamorous occupation.

A more regular motive nowadays, is that someone discovers that they don’t really take pleasure in their chosen career. Perhaps things didn’t turn out the way they hoped for. For example, I have come across a lot of former teachers who made the decision to do other things as they became disillusioned by the lack of discipline in modern schools.

There is also the small matter of remuneration. There are some jobs that are enormously satisfying, for example in scientific research, but the pay rates are low and the positions are often short-term or temporary. For someone who is required to support children, the call of a more remunerative career in a more mundane field is easy to understand. The way somebody once put it to me, job fulfilment is all fine and dandy, but it’s little consolation if you are trying to bring up a family on less than £20,000 a year and your children are short of the basic essentials. At the other extreme, many drop out of remunerative jobs to be able to take up a less well paid yet more satisfying job, or to allow them to work from home in some capacity.

An increasingly common and unwished for cause of a career move is being laid off. Those who are laid off can take the opportunity to make use of their redundancy payout to start up a self-employed business. Sometimes it may be related to whatever they had carried out in their previous jobs, on other occasions it could be something completely different. By way of example, somebody I knew, laid off from a civil service position, established his own antiques auction room.

With the invention of the WWW, there is a large number of Internet business opportunities which can be taken up by people wanting a change of scene or who find themselves redundant. These may be described as ‘online jobs’ since people can work from home and connect to people by way of the Web. People who have never worked with computers may be afraid that they don’t have sufficient IT skills to avail themselves of such jobs, however they can easily be trained up and a lot pick up the new skills surprisingly quickly. Whether people become unfulfilled in their present career and are looking for a change of direction, or become unemployed and are seeking out new opportunities, the online jobs to be found in Internet business offer people a real opportunity to make a fresh start.