Encore! Choosing Your Second Career

Yesterday I reviewed Marc Freedman’s excellent book, Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life, and promised you that I would elaborate on the Appendix, wherein the author presents many, many resources to help YOU pick YOUR next career. I went back over it today, and this task is considerably more difficult than I thought, primarily because there are so many resource lists, and I just can’t pick and choose for you. Which leads me back to yesterday’s conclusion – Buy the book!

There IS one interesting way of thinking introduced in the Appendix which introduces a way of thinking about second careers that I hadn’t thought of before. Freedman asks you to consider which of the following appeals to you. You could be:

Career Recycler, building on your expertise in one field to transition to the next.

Career Changer, trying something totally new, perhaps utilizing a dormant or underutilized skill.

Career Maker, taking a lifelong interest and parlaying it into a job that helps others.

Over dinner tonight with some friends, the two other men in the group shared about their prospective careers. Both of them are engineers by trade.
One, who recently retired, has been waging his third life threatening battle with cancer, and has an interesting wrinkle on the above. He would like to parlay what he has learned from his extensive (though unintentional) contact with our medical and insurance system, to become an ombudsman to help others negotiate their way through their own medical battles.

The other was interested in resurrecting a long dormant career in nursing, and has begun to take the necessary courses.

And then there’s yours truly, the erstwhile broker/financial guy who wants to use his long dormant writing skills to “help you get the best out of the rest of your life.”

It seems that we’re an interesting mix of the above categories. Which tells me not to use them as pigeonholes, but rather as springboards for brainstorming discussions.

You must free your mind, grasshopper. There are NO limitations. :-) Bob

Comments

Terry Nagel said…
There's plenty of help available for people considering "encore careers" on Encore.org, an online community created by Civic Ventures, the nonprofit Marc Freedman started for boomers who want to find meaningful work in the second half of life.

Join the Encore community (it's free) and you'll keep abreast of new opportunities offered by public and private organizations helping to reframe retirement as an opportunity to work in paid jobs that contribute to the community.

Oh, and you might want to buy the book, too!

Terry Nagel
Managing Editor, Encore.org
February 19, 2008 at 6:29 PM
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