Your Brilliant Second Career

Your work experience makes you a valuable commodity. Figure out how you want to parlay it into a new career for yourself

by Liz Ryan

I have always wondered how a kid in his second year of college is supposed to pick a major and then, a couple of years later, dive into a career. At that stage in life, most folks know almost nothing about the range of careers that are available and have so little life experience. It's no wonder that, in survey after survey, midcareer professionals report that they "fell into" their areas of specialization. Few, if any, of us, after all, have childhood dreams of becoming a procurement manager, a process engineer, or a human resources information systems analyst. And yet, here we are.

What's exciting these days is that, with average job tenures getting shorter and shorter and big-company lifetime jobs already a thing of the past, more and more midcareer professionals are finding job happiness in Chapter Two careers—sometimes in radically different areas from the gigs they've held for the first 15 or 20 years out of college. Still, sitting in your cubicle at XYZ Corp., it can be hard to imagine yourself taking the necessary steps onto a wildly different career path. Here are some ideas for getting started.

Your first step, as you contemplate a midcareer shift, is to identify what you do well and what you enjoy doing at work. If you're looking at an entrepreneurial endeavor, you'll also need to know what things people and/or businesses will pay for. And if you're planning on paid employment with a different focus, you'd be wise to look into the five- or 10-year hiring outlook for the field you're considering.

Making Your List

Planning your second career is a very different exercise from your first career choice. This time, you have the benefit of your work experience and life experience, and free Internet research to help you on your way. You are looking for a field that will not only provide an income, but will exercise muscles you may not have flexed in a while (or maybe, ever).

Write down the elements you'd like to find in your second career: More flexibility? Less administrative burden? More creativity, less travel, more analytical work, less writing? After 10 or 20 years in the workforce, you should have a good sense of what you're good at and what you enjoy.

But if you are struggling, ask your friends. Send a group e-mail to 20 business and personal friends and ask them for their advice. Or gather a group of folks together and enjoy a roundtable conversation over lunch. You may learn about professional areas that you didn't know existed. One friend of mine, Sherry, was a technical writer for 20 years. She's very skilled, but she was completely burned out on technical writing. "I feel as though I have written every manual in the world," she said. She couldn't do it anymore. She did her research, and made the transition into a new career as a product trainer.

The World Outside

For starters, she conducted a hefty number of hours of online research, focusing on career-oriented sites like Vault.com, and read job descriptions on Salary.com to see how a range of working people spend their time. She realized that one thing she badly needed was face-to-face interaction, and eventually she found the ASTD.org Web site, the online home of the American Society of Training and Development. At that point, she began attending local ASTD meetings and talking with training people—and realized that corporate training was her best next-career destination.

Sherry was able to take her expertise in making complex language simpler, and use it in a new role training salespeople on product features and benefits. No writing—but lots of instruction, conversation, and humor—and the person-to-person interaction she had missed while writing manuals in a cube for two decades.

If Sherry's second career took her three or four steps down a logical path from "my current career" to "my next one," plenty of folks have journeyed much further. My friend Jennifer was a consultant for Accenture (ACN), traveling around the country and advising energy companies on their IT strategies. When that became too much of the same, she took a job managing an Aveda store and salon. That led her to an assignment leading the marketing efforts for a high-end retail complex.