What If You’re Not Starting Again?

There’s a lot of conversation at the moment about midlife career change.

Perhaps that isn’t surprising. The world of work is changing extraordinarily quickly. Industries are evolving, AI is altering jobs we once assumed would always exist, and it can sometimes feel impossible to predict what our working lives will look like even a few years from now.

But I think something else is happening too.

More people are reaching their late 40s and 50s, looking at the career they’ve built and thinking: I’ve done this. I’ve worn the T-shirt. Do I really want to spend the next 15 or 20 years doing exactly the same thing?

And I’m not convinced that’s a crisis.

It might simply be a very reasonable question.

When 50 meant something different

I spent more than 25 years working in recruitment, and I remember a time when turning 50 could noticeably change the way employers saw you.

However experienced or capable someone was, there could be an assumption that their best working years were behind them. They might be overlooked for opportunities or considered less ambitious, less adaptable or somehow less valuable than a younger candidate.

Thankfully, many organisations now recognise what experienced employees bring to the workplace. They carry knowledge that has taken decades to acquire. They can be brilliant mentors. They often have a different perspective on ambition and competition and are more willing to share what they know rather than constantly worrying about the next rung on the ladder.

Yet I wonder whether some of those old assumptions about age haven't disappeared completely.

Perhaps we've simply internalised them.

Because when someone in their 50s talks about doing something completely different, the reaction can still be:

Why would you want to start again now?

But what if you're not starting again?

The career changes. The experience doesn’t disappear.

I started my first business in my early 50s.

It didn’t work out as I'd hoped, largely because circumstances at the time made it difficult to continue, so I returned to the corporate world.

Then, two years later, I tried again.

This time I opened my coaching practice, which I still run today.

Some people wondered why I was doing it. Why take the risk at that age? Why not stay with what I knew? Surely, at some point, you’re supposed to want to slow down?

But I didn't feel as though I was starting from scratch.

I had spent 25 years in recruitment. I had been a qualified coach since 2006. I understood careers, organisations, hiring, ambition, workplace behaviour and what happens when people find themselves questioning where they belong professionally.

Today I use all of that experience when I work with women navigating life and career change.

The career changed. The experience didn’t disappear.

And perhaps that is something we underestimate when we contemplate changing direction later in life.

We look at the new career and see everything we haven't done yet, rather than looking at ourselves and recognising everything we're bringing with us.

Your job title is not the whole story

Imagine someone who has spent 25 years as a teacher and now wants to leave education.

It would be very easy for her to think, But teaching is all I know.

Except it isn't.

She knows how to take complicated information and make it understandable. She can hold the attention of a room. She can plan, present, organise, adapt, manage competing demands and read people remarkably quickly. She has probably dealt with difficult conversations, conflicting priorities and situations that required considerable patience and judgement.

Those skills don't stop being valuable simply because she no longer wants to stand in a classroom.

Or consider a solicitor who decides she no longer wants to practise law. Years of analysing information, gathering evidence, questioning assumptions, negotiating, assessing risk and spotting the detail everyone else missed don't suddenly become irrelevant.

The question becomes: where else could those abilities be useful?

And I think that question can change the way we approach career change completely.

Instead of asking, “What could I possibly do now?” we start asking, “Where else could everything I already know take me?”

Whose idea of midlife are you living?

There is another complication when we consider changing direction later in life.

Other people have opinions.

When I started my business in my 50s, I heard versions of: Why now? Haven't you had enough? Don't you want to slow down?

Usually these comments are well intentioned. Friends, family and partners want us to be secure. They don't want us to make a mistake or give up something we've worked hard to achieve.

But their advice inevitably comes through the filter of their own beliefs about work, money, risk, success and what a good life should look like.

Sometimes the limits we encounter in midlife aren't ours. They belong to other people's ideas about what this stage of life should look like.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to sensible advice. Changing career can have very real financial and practical consequences, particularly when other people depend on us.

But there is a difference between considering reality and allowing someone else's definition of what is sensible to quietly become our own.

Perhaps that distinction becomes increasingly important as we get older.

Because you could easily have another 15 or 20 years of working life ahead of you.

That's a long time to remain somewhere simply because leaving would look unconventional.

Maybe this isn’t reinvention at all

We hear a lot about reinventing ourselves in midlife.

I'm not sure we always need to.

Reinvention suggests throwing away what came before and creating something entirely new. Yet some of the most interesting career changes I've seen aren't really reinventions at all.

They are people taking what they know and applying it somewhere new.

Experience. Judgement. Knowledge. Relationships. Perspective. The ability to know what matters and, perhaps just as importantly, what doesn't.

At 25, we may have had more years ahead of us.

But at 50, we have something our younger selves could never have possessed:

the benefit of having lived and worked through the years behind us.

Perhaps the question, then, isn't whether you're too old to start again.

Perhaps it's whether “starting again” is even an accurate description of what you're doing.

You aren't arriving empty-handed.

You're bringing everything you've learned with you.

And maybe the more interesting question isn't:

What job could I do next?

It's:

Where could everything I already know take me next?

Wendi

P.S. If you stopped thinking about your job title for a moment and looked instead at everything you've learned how to do, where else might those skills belong?