To Anyone Changing Career Direction in Their Forties

A career change in your forties isn't starting over from scratch. You're moving with everything you've built over twenty years: your experience, your eye for people, how you solve problems, how you work.

So you don't necessarily have to do something completely different. A good pivot is often just a step or two to the side of what you've been doing, adding one new ability to what you already have.

Of course your salary may dip for a while, or your title may drop. If that feels like too much, make the change smaller. A career change doesn't have to mean betting everything and jumping.

And if you don't know what you want to do, I'd rather you didn't start with a certificate or a degree. I'm someone who has studied a great deal, but school is a rather expensive way to explore. Where you can, try it small first. Do a side project, freelance a little, or go meet people who do that work.

You don't need to quit first, either. Once you try it, you find out sooner than you'd expect whether you really like the work, whether you can do it well, or whether it only looked good from a distance.

You don't need to compete with people in their twenties. What you bring in your forties isn't stamina or cheap labor. It's experience and judgment: quickly seeing what matters, reading people and situations, having solved problems before. These don't appear overnight.

Nor do you have to find work that makes your heart race. If you're good at it, it pays, and it doesn't wear you out over the long run, I think that's a pretty good career too.

Above all, continuing something only because you'd hate to waste what you've put in may be the most wasteful choice of all.

In your forties it's easy to feel it's too late. But even if you spend five years changing direction and settling in, you'll be 50. That's still an age with plenty of working years ahead.

I've turned my own career around several times. Looking back, though, I rarely started completely over.

I wasn't throwing away what I'd built and taking another road. I was carrying all of it and changing direction.

A career change in your forties is less a reset than a rearrangement of everything you've accumulated.

So please don't think it's too late.

You have more working days ahead of you than you might think.