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Volunteering led to Canadian’s career change

During a nearly 30-year career working in customs brokerage houses, Sandie Seymour often found herself helping co-workers and friends prepare their resumes and find new jobs.

Sandie Seymour
Sandie Seymour
Now, at age 59, the Surrey, British Columbia, resident has transformed that occasional avocation into her full-time work by helping Canadian immigrants find jobs and adjust to their new homes. Best of all, Sandie said, “I love it. I wish I’d done it earlier.”

Sandie started re-orienting herself toward a career change in 2002 and 2003. She worked for her husband in a customs brokerage business, and “things weren’t going so well, relationship-wise,” she said. She took some time off and went through a career exploration course, which concluded that she was best suited to employment counseling or religious work. [Read more…]

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Retired cop: Two career changes and counting

Jill Angel
Click the image to watch a video about Jill Angel's career changes.
Jill Angel is tough, and she’s got trophies to prove it.

The Sacramento-area resident twice won the California “Toughest Cop Alive” competition for women by running three miles uphill, climbing 300 stairs, climbing ropes. lifting weights, sprinting 100 meters and completing a 300-yard obstacle course — all in one day.

After retiring from the Californina Highway Patrol, Jill moved into her first career change. She dabbled in the country music business as an agent. Her biggest success was helping her cousin sell a song that reached the Radio Disney Top 10. But even with a few clients, she had a hard time making enough to support her twodaughters.

Then her police fitness training came back into play. The AARP recently posted a four-minute video about Jill’s career changes. Jill’s story also was mentioned in a 2010 article from OnSacramento.com.

I’m finding lots of articles about sunset-chasing career changers. I’m planning to share those with you, in addition to writing articles based on my own interviews.

Did you enjoy this article? Please leave a comment and share it with your friends! Have you undergone your own career transformation after 50 or know somebody who has? Please send me a note. Let’s inspire others!

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77-year-old pastor: ‘Follow your dream’

The Rev. Sylvia J. BakerShe was 57, and after 20 years as an administrative assistant and manager for Pittsburgh environmental engineering firms, Sylvia J. Baker felt the call to do something else with her life.

Another 20 years has passed, and Sylvia — the Rev. Sylvia, actually — has been pastor of the Assembly of God Church in tiny Shanksville, Pa., since 1999. The fact that she describes her career transformation as “easy to do” makes it no less remarkable.

Although she had spent many years as an active church member, Sunday school teacher and lay leader, “I decided that I knew there was something else that God wanted me to do.” So she began taking distance education courses to become licensed as an Assemblies of God pastor. [Read more…]

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Jim Kukral book: Build your business around your ideal lifestyle

Business Around A Lifestyle book coverI’ve been a fan of Jim Kukral since 2010, when he was among my instructors in an online marketing course by the University of San Francisco. I’ve not met him, but it’s clear from hearing him and watching videos, he’s an upbeat person who truly loves to share what he knows about Internet marketing.

That brings us to his new book, Business Around A Lifestyle, Volume 1. The subtitle is First Step: How to Dream Your Perfect Lifestyle, Then Go Get It!

It’s short. The book will take about an hour or two to read. Kukral starts with the premise that the world has moved on, and many people are stuck in jobs that don’t support the lifestyle they want to lead. He offers some basic, concrete steps for figuring your own ideal lifestyle, and then offers lots of encouragement to go out and get it.

To his credit, Kukral is very clear about one thing: building a business around your ideal lifestyle is hard work. He’s not offering any get-rich quick schemes. Wrapped into his encouragement, he’s included interviews with seven people who’ve built “lifestyle” businesses. For most of them, the income isn’t as important as having the flexibility to spend time with kids and spouses, travel and spend time in the community.

Having said that, it seems that all of his interview subjects have found internet business niches that reward them handsomely. You won’t learn a lot of business details, but you will learn what motivated these folks to go into business for themselves, some of their fears and doubts, and some insight into their typical days.

I’m planning to focus www.SunsetChasing.com on people over 50 who have changed careers, and as far as I can tell, none of the interview subjects were that old. Kukral’s advice and examples, however, are easy to apply to the mid- to late-career changers among us.

I know that Jim likes to work fast, and as a result there are a few typographical errors in the copy, mostly among the answers his subjects give. I suspect they’re transcription errors. The mistakes only detract from the polish, not the heart of the stories.

The book includes links to the websites run by his subjects, but it would be nice if he explored a little more detail about their businesses, exactly what the do and how their businesses grew. Perhaps that information will part of the next two books in the series. Volume 2 will focus on taking your passion and turning it into a business. Volume 3 is about building a business through affiliate marketing.

I’m sure I’ll be reading both.

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My crazy trip: The seed of an idea

I called it my “crazy trip.”

In January 2009, about a month after being laid off from my job as the online director of a local newspaper, I packed my Hyundai Tucson and took a drive from my home near Pittsburgh to New Mexico and back. Along the way, I stopped in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., spent a night near Oklahoma City, explored the rock art known as petroglyphs near Albuquerque, N.M., and visited a cousin and the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. It was a wonderful trip, and I traveled through and to places I’d never seen.

One late afternoon as I  headed west, probably in Arkansas or Oklahoma, it occurred to me that the sunset seemed to last a little longer than usual. It was probably my imagination, but I let it run, and I began thinking because I was driving into the sunset I was prolonging the day – even if it was just a tad. To get a little extra daylight, a little extra time, I was chasing the sunset.

I began thinking about how “sunset-chasing” applied to my job situation. There I was, 52 years old, facing a career situation I’d never experienced. I was jobless and not quite sure what I would do next, or even what I wanted to do. My working life is by no means over, but it’s somewhere around the start of the seventh inning. What could I do to alter my career, and even prolong it? How could I chase the sunset?

I wasn’t, and am not, the only person to face questions about what to do next after a long career in one field. Maybe I could draw some inspiration from others who’d faced the same challenge and transformed themselves. Better yet, maybe others could draw inspiration from those stories, too.

Thus, the idea for this website and blog was first conceived. It simmered and even cooled for a while, but I’ve drawn some inspiration from an Internet marketing course I took through the University of San Francisco. Blogging about new careers for the over-50 set is a new path for me. I hope to simply tell the stories of people who’ve faced their fears, taken some unusual turns and ended up in surprising places that are productive and fulfilling.

I know a few sunset-chasers who have some great stories to tell. If you’ve got one, or if you know somebody who would make a great profile, let me know. Thanks for reading!

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