to help you thrive professionally until retirement….and beyond
You’ve worked hard to get where you are professionally. You’ve put in the hours, made sacrifices, and done what it takes to be successful. Now that you’re in the prime of your career, you want to make sure that you’re doing everything possible to stay on track — and even thrive — until retirement. And beyond!
There’s no reason to feel that as we get older, we can’t learn new things and have career goals that stimulate us, no matter what the future might hold.
For the past year, we’ve uncovered valuable insights facilitating Career Extensions workshops that will help you flourish.
Here’s the top 5:
#1: Keep learning
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve heard this before but…. all of us are at risk of being disrupted. It used to be that only certain types of jobs — software development, doctors, or legal careers — needed continual development and upskilling. Now your expertise has a much shorter shelf life. It’s time to look at learning as an opportunity to develop multidisciplinary skills rather than an exercise in keeping up.
Put your experience to use. Seek out different opportunities that will make you more well-rounded and in doing so, flex your resilience muscle. Start with small steps, attend a conference outside of your expertise, take a class on Coursera, LinkedIn or edX, join a professional network, or shadow someone in a role that interests you. Or a big step — be an intern. Before you think it’s too late….it’s not. “Paul Critchlow, former Head of Communications at Merrill Lynch, decided to take an internship at Pfizer aged 70, ….exceeding his expectations.” Navigating disruption requires a commitment to lifelong learning — no matter what the future of work looks like.
#2: Look beyond the ‘job for life’
Once routinely offered, a job for life, is truly a relic of the past. Reshape your thinking on career models, test assumptions about retirement and prevailing myths about work. Research from Deloitte suggests that only 19 percent of companies still have traditional functional career models where you train for a role, stay in your chosen lane, and move up the ladder with time and experience. Someone in midlife, for instance, will typically have worked between one and four jobs in their career so far. And college graduates may have a dozen different jobs by the time they reach the midway point!
Looking for what’s next doesn’t mean jumping ship at the first sign of boredom or trouble — far from it. But it does mean that you should be open and flexible to the idea of changing careers, or at least making a significant pivot, at some point in your life. That means intentionally checking in with yourself and figuring out if the role you’re in is right for you, both professionally and personally, at each stage in your life. You don’t have to have a specific goal in mind. There’s value in recognizing and deciding, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” We’ve all had those moments. This is your pivot point — to ask, what do you really want to do?”
Read the rest of the article on Medium.