Are You Ever Too Old to Change Careers?

It's never too late to have a change of heart and a change of career. More and more people over fifty are deciding to switch track before retirement age, and there are all sorts of reasons you might want to make a career change later in life. These days, sixty or seventy isn't considered old age. So why might you want to make a change?

It could simply be that you're not happy in your current role and just want to change something in your working life. That's a perfectly valid reason itself, but bear in mind that if you do switch to something completely new, you may need to retrain and you may find yourself towards the bottom of the ladder.

Retraining is easy enough if you find the right employer or right external course. You also have a valuable set of skills built up over the course of your career, many soft and transferable skills which a new employer will value. You might not be on the bottom rung of your new career for long.

You might also change because you want to follow your true passion, and your current job isn't something which gets you fired up. That might mean setting up your own small company and turning your hobbies into your day job. It's something to think carefully about, given the financial implications. If you're certain about it though, then nothing should stop you.

Fewer people want to quietly wind down to retirement, so if you like a challenge and want something new, you're never too old to make that career change.