Planning Is Key in Making a Mid-Life Career Change

For Ed de Merlier, 48, the executive recruitment business had lost much of its charm after nine years, so he moved on--to open a shop featuring self-serve ice cream and frozen yogurt.

After 28 years as an engineer in the Army and on space projects, John Winslow, 51, quit his job to experience the challenges of the private sector.

When Atlantic Richfield offered employees attractive retirement deals this spring, Burt Strickley, 53, seized on the chance to open a business maintaining swimming pools.

In different ways and for different reasons, these workers are attempting the same potentially tricky maneuver: switching careers at a time in life when many of their peers are comfortably ensconced in a lasting occupational niche.

In coming years, workers at mid-life will be more likely to encounter such career crossroads, according to experts in employment. Attitudes toward work are changing, with younger employees particularly open to trying something different after an initial career foray. And in other cases, such as that of Strickley, established workers unexpectedly face career considerations when companies cut the payroll through retirement incentives or layoffs.

“I think changing careers is a very strong, growing trend,” says Beth Beeler, a career counselor with the UCLA Placement and Career Planning Center. “We always have waiting lists for the seminars we give, and that tells us something.”

Trading careers in midstream can be a tremendously liberating, rewarding experience--or a nightmare. It offers new opportunities for job satisfaction, creativity and wealth. But it also may entail serious financial and professional risks.

Those familiar with the subject stress that career changers boost their chances for success if they thoroughly study what they’re getting into before they leap. More than a little self-study is advised, as well. Workers need to assess just what is bothering them about their current situation and gauge how much they are prepared to risk--financially and emotionally--to change matters.

One helpful approach is for workers to build on what they already know, whether this means finding a job in a related field or saying goodby to the corporate world altogether and starting their own enterprise.

Jeffrey G. Allen, co-author of “Finding the Right Job at Midlife” and an advocate of what he calls the “go-for-what-you-know” approach to success, maintains: “The mistake that so many people make is that they dart into something wrong. But you can’t expect to get the right job unless you parlay what you know through your life experience.”

Allen, an attorney, says that one way to move into a new job is to get a consulting assignment for an employer and turn it into something permanent.

Mike Parker, president of New Career Opportunities Inc. of Glendale, which holds seminars on how to start a business, recalls the cases of a secretary who branched out by founding a secretarial service and a homemaker who parlayed her household talents into an upholstery repair business. But Parker warns that mere familiarity with a product or service isn’t enough to ensure success. The would-be capitalist must also appreciate the importance of record keeping, marketing, selling and the other nuts and bolts that keep a business stable.

“Business is a discipline,” says Parker, “and if you can’t discipline yourself you can’t operate a business.

Self-discipline also is required if a person seeks a new employer. Job-seekers should be prepared to brush up such forgotten skills as writing a resume and participating in a job interview, possibly having to impress somebody 20 years their junior.

“The only difference between selling a product and selling yourself is that (when you sell yourself) you’re both the goods and the salesman,” Allen says.

Winslow, the engineer, recalls that he began his search with a resume that was “a dull recital of where I’d been and what I’d done.” After joining 40 Plus, a group that provides a variety of support services for professionals seeking new jobs, he rewrote the resume. The snappier, more conversational resume triggered a phone call from a company that had previously sent him a rejection slip.

“That taught me there are tricks to the trade,” he says.

Winslow, who quit his job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena last March, learned another lesson: Landing the right job takes time.

“It’s a courtship with a long relationship at stake,” he says, adding: “And I’m in the courtship, too. I’m not just looking for the first thing that comes along. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want the right job.”

Another fact of life for older job-seekers is the possibility that they will run into age discrimination. Such bias is illegal but can be hard to prove. Many attempt to avoid this and other hassles of the job market by starting their own business, a guarantee of independence--and responsibility.

“I kind of assumed that at age 53 there wasn’t going to be much more room for advancement with the corporation,” says Strickley, who held several different jobs during 18 years at Arco before recently purchasing 48 accounts from an established pool-maintenance company.

For De Merlier of Garden Grove, who hopes to have a self-service ice cream and frozen yogurt shop operating in either Orange County or Riverside County in the near future, the key was a desire to test his notions of retailing.

“The idea gradually grew and grew and gradually took me over,” he says. “I’m not getting any younger, and if I was going to do something like this, it was time to do it.”

The soon-to-be ice cream vendor has visions of expanding through franchises but for now intends to focus his energies on making the first store a success. “I’m just determined that it will work,” he says.

Determination is needed. The inexperienced entrepreneur sometimes underestimates the demands of a new enterprise. “Some end up feeling isolated and overwhelmed,” observes UCLA’s Beeler. “They feel that the risks are not worth the time and energy and money.”

Thus, changing careers--by choice--isn’t for everybody. In particular, those older workers with painful memories of the Great Depression may prize job stability above all else. By contrast, members of the highly educated baby boom generation appear more inclined to broaden their experience and maximize job satisfaction through career changes, says Carolyn Paul, an assistant professor of gerontology at USC.

For example, Maggie Wong, 33, quit her job as a sales manager at Sears, Roebuck in April because “it was just time to move on. Psychologically, I felt I was at break-even.”

Wong, suddenly without the income and security of a successful job, has willingly endured the insecurity because of her stronger wish to gain control over her career. She says she hopes to open a travel agency in Costa Mesa in January.

Unfortunately, those--unlike Wong--whose skills become obsolete or whose industries contract may not always have a choice about staying where they are. “I think that second careers are forced on people more than they are planned,” Paul says.

Whatever the case, a new career offers at least the possibility of revitalizing a boring or frustrated work life.

“Starting at the bottom of the ladder and working your way up is difficult,” observes Tod Lipka, assistant director of the Second Careers Program, a nonprofit employment agency for older workers in Los Angeles. “But the upside is a whole new set of challenges and opportunities.”