ABC News: Boomers Refuse to Give Up on Encore Careers
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Laid-off boomers won’t take no for an answer and are using creative strategies to land encore careers, says ABC News in a report that appeared on Good Morning America today. Three women profiled found their encore careers by being humble, entrepreneurial and open to new ways of networking.
Tory Johnson, author of Fired to Hired, tells Diane Sawyer that Caterina Ramsey, 54, of Belton, Texas, lost her husband to cancer and sought a job in the front office of her daughters’ school for nine months before she accepted the only position offered as a part-time cafeteria monitor. She checked her pride and did that job so well that she was hired for the administrative job she wanted.
After Jan Albert, 56, of Trabuco Canyon, California, lost her real estate job, she spent more time with her aging parents and wasn’t happy about the care they were receiving. She discovered she liked taking care of them herself and began to dream of a new career opportunity. She completed a gerontology certificate program at a local community college and started an elder care service with her sister.
Jennifer Turner, 50, of Huntington, N.Y., was depressed for three months after she lost her job as a training manager for a life insurance firm. Then she decided to learn everything she could about social networking. She credits her new-found skill with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter with helping her land her job as director of learning and development for Goodwill of New York and New Jersey.
In “Finding Jobs Now: Silver Lining for Older Workers” on the ABC News site, Johnson says, “No doubt the job market is challenging for everyone right now, but what I’m most impressed with among boomers is a refusal to give up. Statistics show discouraged workers throwing in the towel on their search in every age group except this one.”
Johnson encourages boomers to follow their passion to a new kind of work, to inquire about educational benefits and financial assistance they may obtain, to take advantage of programs aimed at older workers like the community college programs funded by Civic Ventures, explore social networking, be realistic in their job search.
Most important, she notes, is to believe in oneself. She gives Jan Albert as an example, who she says, “contemplated returning to school for fresh training, but she worried about how she’d fare with students half her age. Then came her first assignment – and as she wrote it, she realized she had so many life experiences to draw from, and she aced it. But she almost allowed the self-doubt to keep her from enrolling.”
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- by Terry Nagel
Unemployment
This is just one proof that social networking is also an efficient way of job hunting. Conversely, as the economy is down these days and layoffs are sufficient across the industries, a lot of people are seeking for work. Today, the unemployed sector cuts through a very broad cross-section of the country. Barring something truly unforeseeable, such as the creation of a whole new economy, we are likely to see an unprecedented recessionary shift toward permanent job losses. Since late 2007, some 8 million jobs have vanished, and the end is not yet in sight. The ranks of the unemployed have now swelled to nearly 16 million people. In the past, recessions have resulted primarily in blue-collar and low-level retail job losses, with white-collar layoffs accounting for only about 30 percent of total losses. By way of contrast, in the current downturn, nearly 50% of the vanished jobs have been managerial, professional, and skilled white-collar positions.