Thank you for your wonderful response to last week’s post, Thinking Differently About Your Career, and Jill’s free video series. As our Director of Career Services, Jill is leading the charge to support you as you step into leading your career – wherever you are in the process.
It’s important to understand that career leadership is not only about jobs that you take for pay; it’s about all your work. It’s about all of the work that brings you meaning and satisfaction, whether paid or unpaid.
A number of our readers who are in their 50’s and 60’s and some new retirees wrote about how the post helped them to start thinking about what is next for them. In fact, this weekend we were excited to see a great article in the New York Times entitled “ Over 50 and Back in College, Preparing for a New Career.”
As Jill said last week, career leadership is not a one-and-done approach. Career leadership is a way of living in the world and bringing your leadership to pursuing work that is rich and meaningful, and to finding ways to genuinely make a difference in an organization or area that matters to you.
In the New York Times article mentioned above they quote Cynthia Hutchins, director of financial gerontology (what an interesting sounding field) at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as saying “Many (people) see retirement as a chance to pursue career dreams that weren’t feasible before retirement.” The articles goes on to say that “more than half of retirees 70 or younger retired before they had originally intended; 40% did so because of health-related issues and 26% because of layoffs, forced early retirement or other issues with their employers.” So, becoming a leader of your career is essential in this time when it’s challenging to predict what your future will look like. Becoming the leader of your own career gives you some measure of control as you navigate the twists and turns of this economy.
This week, regardless of your age or stage in your career, we’d encourage you to spend a few minutes reflecting on whether you are the leader of your career. Review last week’s post and sign up to get the Free Career Leadership Video Series, if you haven’t already done so. And, in addition, we’d encourage you to start a file where you put ideas that catch your attention, articles like this one that are talking about something newly available in your career planning, and ideas about steps you can take to be a leader in your career.