I think there’s a very big difference between the pleasure from an activity and the sense of achievement. So, what is rewarding after 70 for me comes most closely to understanding what will feel like success? What will feel like achievement?
I remember a very, very experienced professional who’d had some big corporate jobs and as he got older and more elderly, I would meet with him regularly. He told me that now, as he moved into his mid-seventies, all he believe he should do was watch and pray. To acknowledge this, he had a lapel badge with a heron. This is a bird that stands very still watching and then goes in and makes a brief intervention to catch a fish.
It is well worth considering the options that you will have around the location if you want to enjoy your work after 70. It may be that what suits you best is to work from home, to have a minimal amount of travel and then find the clients that will respond to that.
We can get caught up in moving forward with our Portfolio Executive workstyle and lose sight of what we’re really trying to achieve. We can lose sight of why we are motivated to do this in the first place.
That’s what I mean by back to basics.
If you have been following the different things that we have been talking about over the previous weeks and months, you will understand that I’m passionate about people having a working life that makes the most of everything they were created to be and enables that working life to support the wider lifestyle that they want now and in the future.
I remember a very, very experienced professional who’d had some big corporate jobs and as he got older and more elderly, I would meet with him regularly. He told me that now, as he moved into his mid-seventies, all he believe he should do was watch and pray. To acknowledge this, he had a lapel badge with a heron. This is a bird that stands very still watching and then goes in and makes a brief intervention to catch a fish.
Lots of people like the idea of some kind of side hustle, but what does that really mean? What are the choices you face?
There are many situations in our lives where we start to realise that full-time employment is just not working for us. It may be that we are coming into a season where we want to look after our families, we want to have children, we want to spend time with our children.
When I am working with you to help you think about your future, there are two crucial dimensions that I encourage you to examine. One is ‘need to work’ and the other is ‘need for new’. Let’s start with the ‘need to work’ dimension.
As you get more senior in your career, increasingly what people are going to value is less of what you do. Now what matters is what you have learned, what you known, the different range of experiences you have got and the skills you’ve developed. Skills, knowledge and experience are the future for you as you become more senior.
There are number of ways in which you can maximize your learning and development.
When you join a new employer, they haven’t hired you just for what you can do today, they have also hired you with a view of the potential you have to contribute to the business in the future. To create the very best in environment in order to thrive, you need to start to plan your promotion from Day One.
When I have been working with young people who perhaps are not as familiar as they could be with what it means to be an employee, I say to them, you’ve got two jobs here. One is to get the task done that I ask you to get done, that I need to get done. And the second thing is to be a great employee.
When you get a new position, either because you’re joining your employer for the first time, or you’ve got a significant change of role, the first 90 days will set the scene for how you’re perceived within the organization. Your first 90 days will often afford you opportunities to do things that will become more difficult as time passes.
The most recent census in England and Wales was conducted in 2021, relatively recently. Census Day was during lockdown and the pandemic. Many people were on furlough or working from home. But there are still some very interesting things that emerged, which I think make a big difference when we start to think about the opportunities for us to make the most of our working lives as we get older.
You hear plenty of conversations about lifestyle. You may even hear conversations about work/life balance. But how seriously have you thought about the workstyle you really want?
When you come into a new job and as you start to build your presence at your employer, the temptation is to focus your network on the people that are immediately around you
It’s very easy for us to just continue doing what we’re always doing. To assume that the next step is the same as the step before.
It’s amazing that the more senior you get, the less time you have to do useful work. It feels like the whole of your life becomes meetings and that so many of those meetings feel meaningless.
Your Portfolio Executive Workstyle needs to be sustainable, rewarding and enjoyable. It’s not enough, in my view, for it to just keep you busier and busier. You don’t want to be moving from being enslaved by a Corporate Workstyle, to becoming enslaved with your own Portfolio Executive Workstyle.
Many of the people reading this will be in their forties and fifties. They will have senior, responsible roles in organisations. They’ll have huge capacity to influence the environment in which they operate today.
There is huge publicity for successful entrepreneurs. There are lots of people who have aspirations to be an entrepreneur. Too often, however, people have equated starting a business, as being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is a very particular kind of individual.
Earlier in my career I was an IT contractor, working as a software developer, introduced by agencies. Projects typically ran from three to six and sometimes as long as nine months. I understand the opportunity that being a contractor can be for people. It can appear to be more rewarding than permanent salaried employment.
Many people as a first step to leaving permanent full time salaried employment think, ‘I can just carry on doing what I’ve been doing, but as an independent freelancer working for my existing employer, then go and find some other organisations that I can be an independent freelancer for’. This can be a great way to start, if you have a plan to move on from that.
I talk to many people who have enjoyed the interim workstyle. They like the excitement of working in a new situation every three to nine months. The challenge of sorting things out and learning new things suits them. It can be a great kicker to your mid-career. But very often, I am talking to them because they realise that it won’t make their future work.
I have spent all my working life around professionals who have sought to build a career through their professional skills. But very early on in my working life I realised that, for me, being in full-time professional employment, wasn’t going to Make my Future Work.
The youngest age a child can work is 13, unless they obtain a performance licence. Generally, there is no compulsory retirement age (with the exception of age limits set by law or jobs that require certain physical abilities).
As I write this (Oct 21), the headlines trumpet that job vacancies are at an all-time high. Workers are expected to have more choice and opportunity than ever before. But for many of us, as we consider our future, we are confronted by two, seemingly unresolvable tensions: our working future with our employer and our career path has lost its promise and yet our financial commitments stretch into a future beyond our hopes of early retirement.
In a world in which working from home has meant that too many of us are ‘always on’, the idea of a 4-day week can seem like an extravagant fantasy. But there is increasing evidence that limiting work hours increases productivity of individual workers and increases the economic productivity of whole nations.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ This inter-generational opening gambit to elicit a conversation from a reluctant niece, nephew or grandchild can be a high-risk tactic. For my jungle obsessed younger brother, the response for many years was ‘a gorilla’.
Has the pandemic given you an opportunity to re-think your personal priorities and re-assess your relationship with your boss? Perhaps you have been on furlough or suffered redundancy and you are ready to make a fresh start.
There are some pretty scary statistics out there about what can happen as you move beyond 45 in to your 50’s and later.
There are some impressive young people out there who have found Covid has stopped their career ambitions dead. At a similar stage in my life, it was the kindness of both strangers and family contacts that enabled me to get started and I have never forgotten all that they did for me.
Students were hoping to be home at Christmas. Many would have been disappointed by positive Covid tests. Then they were hoping to return for the Spring term and some will have been hindered by the most recent lockdown. Summer vacation, 2021, seems a way to go and an overseas holiday seems more dream than hope.
You can easily become hopeless making application after application for advertised positions. Often, you need to customise your CV, write a tailored covering letter and fill in a detailed application form. Typically, you get no feedback but an automated acknowledgement.
March is usually the time when the wedding fairs start anew with all the hopes of new life – spring lambs, bluebells in the woods and cooing pigeons across the city. But the wiser amongst us will nod sagely and tell us that marriage is so much more than a wedding.
I knew the axe was going to fall; I knew when it was going to fall and now my job was over. I thought I was mentally prepared. I had some dreams for the future. There was a bit of a financial buffer but now I need to get out there and find my next role.
The relentless tyranny of the urgent and the ever-growing pace of challenging change can slowly erode the joy from the passion that brought you to your chosen career.