Changing jobs is not easily done after forty but sometimes you have no other choice. Your job no longer exists, the company went out of business, you must move to another area, the reasons are varied. It is anything but easy to start over at this perilous age, but sometimes there is not another choice. My advice is to keep searching and know that you will eventually find something that you will feel comfortable doing.
When a plant you have been employed at maybe ten or fifteen years shut down, you are given a notice and that's it. Sometimes you get severance pay, sometimes not; sometimes they will help you relocate, sometimes not. What you do is to be brave and go elsewhere and look for work.
Yet, the kind of job that this title speaks about is elective job changes. You are sick and tired of working for peanuts and you know your better skills are not being utilized. What you do is before you actually quit your dull and unsatisfactory job is plan for a new one.
You upgrade your skills. Once you were skilled as a secretary, at least that is what you trained to be but you sucked into being a buyer for Sears. It isn't your type of work and maybe your promotions would have been better had you shown more enthusiasm. As it now stands you are considered more like an assistant than the big buyer and your promotions have been almost nonexistent.
Once you learn the ropes and talk to a few of the professionals and learn all there is to learn about what a good secretary you are, you set out to become one of those.
As part of the new training, for any kind of new job, you get rid of any old habits that may keep you from getting your new line of work. You must not only know the work, you must beat out the young ones standing in line for the job. You understand that bosses of any company anywhere prefer to get the workers young. They will not mind the extra time and expense of training them in the way they want them to work; this they will not do for the forty and over.
At least, they are less willing to do this with older workers at forty or older. At most you will only give them ten or fifteen years or even less, and they will not want to take a chance on you. You have a few things in your favor here: You are not as gullible as the younger workers and being a few years older than the boss, you know a few things he does not.
You point out to him exactly how useful you will be. You let him know that this has been the kind of job you trained for when you were young but you were side-tracked by circumstances. Now that your children are all grown you have fewer obligations than the younger women who will be getting married and will be leaving. While you don't say this you some how let him know how reliable you are and you let your prospective boss know you will only improve with practice.
You have them listening. Now you follow through and you make every chance you have to show your capabilities count. In fact with this new attitude, you were the one that started the rumor that paid off so well for the older workers and Wal-Mart: that older workers are more dependable. It is with reputations such as these that at age forty you successively change careers.
by Effie Moore Salem
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