Why retiring from a successful career can be more challenging than we expect — even when we’re looking forward to it. How Do I Reply When People Ask What I Now Do? One of the first questions we usually ask someone we’ve just met is, “What do you do?” For most of our adult lives, it’s an easy question to answer. I’m a lawyer. I’m a banker. I run a business. I’m a partner at a professional services firm. It’s a convenient introduction. But it also tells people something about o

Studying again in your 50s is just one option for your next chapter The old three-stage life is disappearing. What replaces it? For much of the twentieth century, adult life followed a fairly predictable pattern. First came education. Then work. Then retirement. One day you are working. The next you are not. It was a simple, linear model, and for many people it worked reasonably well. You trained for a career, spent 30 or 40 years building it, and eventually stepped away from

Many organisations are good at managing the departure of older workers via redundancy, but far fewer are good at managing what happens to these valued employees afterwards. For many experienced employees, leaving a long-term role is not simply a job change. It can trigger a profound shift in identity, confidence, routine and purpose. This is particularly for people in their 50s and 60s who may still have 20+ productive working years ahead. Increasingly, I’m working with s

Later-career transition is becoming one of the big societal challenges of our time, but we’re still treating it as if it were a problem that should be solved at the individual level. I recently hosted a discussion with a group of men in their 50s and early 60s talking about career transition. These were highly experienced professionals — from finance, technology, consulting etc - people with decades of expertise behind them. The conversation covered familiar territory: CVs, n

Why You Need To Dip Your Toe In The Water One of the biggest myths about mid-career change is the belief that clarity must come first—that you need a neatly defined destination before you’re able to move. In reality, it’s the opposite, clarity is not a pre-requisite for action. Clarity is a result of action. This matters especially for people in their 50s and 60s who are feeling the uncomfortable weight of identity shock—the moment when the story you’ve lived no longer fits t