Navigating Career Transitions: Reflections Beyond Retirement

On reflection I write about more than retirement. As you think you are about to say goodbye to part of your past it comes back and shouts ‘what about me?’ How can you ignore me.

Helping people find a satisfying career has been part of my life for 40 years. As a staff counsellor aged 27, I was a sounding board to the Directors within my business unit who weren’t able to be honest with their peers and needed a confidential sounding board. I was an executive coach 40 years ago before people even thought this was a thing. 

As a psychologist working in industry I created career development programmes, and pre-retirement seminars. I also designed and chaired assessment centres. Creating group discussions, written exercises, interview plans. I also lead the assessor training for the whole of the Post Office businesses with a team of 50 assessor trainers. People loved this course – very high standards and pass/fail. So, I know how to coach people to do their best at interview.

This meant that when I went self employed (over 25 years ago) and did life coach training in 1998, specialising as a career coach was a no-brainer. I’ve won two awards too – for my Gold Career Discovery Programme and also for my job search support programme. To support clients more I then trained in personal branding, recognising the importance of helping people to stand out by being clearer on who they are.

As this is my first career related post I’m going to ask you some questions, to get you thinking, and more will follow over subsequent ones.

A good first area to think about is: Why am I unhappy?

There are so many reasons. We may

• Feel the job is beneath us and we could do so much more. We aren’t getting to use our education/ experience/ knowledge.

• Be bored … we want to be challenged. Or there could be too much challenge? It’s all too hard – intellectually, physically …

• Need a life and seek more balance. We are expected to do 12-hour days and with travel there is little time for anything except sleep and to wolf down a takeaway.

• Want a job in line with our values. We are no longer driven by money and status.

• Yearn for something meaningful. Something related to our passions and interests.

• Want a promotion. Why doesn’t the boss see us as ready.

Can you relate to any of these reasons? Gaining clarity on what we don’t want can help us with what we do want. But we also want to go much deeper.

Are you clear on your values? What is most important to you? You can find various values activities on line and I’ll go deeper into this another time.

Too often we are constrained by our past. Recruiters look at our CV and think that this is all that we can do, and we can feel e.g. we have spent 15 years as a teacher; or worked in PR since University and don’t look more broadly at transferring these skills.

In this case a good question is: “What skills do you want to continue to use?”. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that we should. There are motivated skills – we are good at and will continue to use; and burnout skills that we may be good at but zap our energy. And of course we can easily learn skills (for me, just now in learning to use substack!).

I’ve wanted this post to set the scene, to show some of my authority and credibility for the work I do. It is so easy to set yourself up as a career coach. Even using the word psychologist is not a protected term. I have been an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society since 1998 and I’m a Doctor of Psychology. I work in an evidence-based way – I utilise research and check that it works!

Over coming posts I’ll explore more around everything careers, including the less talked about transition out of the workplace (retirement).

It doesn’t matter if we are at the start of our career, mid life with so many family challenges alongside work or pondering what to do at 60 plus we can all benefit from taking the time to think about what is important to us with our work.