Tales and tips from a late career changer
The topic of older workers is experiencing increased traction. Whilst the number of over-65s in work has tripled since the millennium, the growth has slowed since the pandemic, as discussed by this IES blog that considers the challenges facing the recruitment and retention of older workers. Labour Market Statistics released in 2025 showed that there are almost one million more older workers (those over 50) economically inactive than before the pandemic.
The forthcoming rise of the State Pension age to 67 further prioritises the need to understand what can drive recruitment and retention of older workers. It’s a topic the team here at IES have been working on, for example looking at recruitment as part of the Good Recruitment for Older Workers (GROW) project with the Centre for Ageing Better, and working with the West London Alliance on research to support system improvements for employment support for the over 50s. And there’s a high level of interest in how job mobility (a change of role, sector or position) can support extended working lives, where job mobility may be within a role or sector or mobility between sectors.
Workers may need job mobility to respond to changes in personal needs such as physical conditions or inflexible shift patterns and so job mobility may be the key to keeping workers in paid employment. But we also know that older workers face barriers to recruitment, with data from before the pandemic highlighting that only a third (35%) of over 50s who are made redundant return to employment within three months, the worst of any age group. These considerations are particularly relevant to the Get Britain Working ambition of an 80% employment rate.
With the prospect of more years in the labour market, some people, like myself, may not only be looking to remain in the workplace but to engineer new careers for themselves at a later stage in life. So, as a late career changer, I thought it might be helpful to others to share some learnings from applying for jobs and changing careers in my 50s.
Like so many ‘women of a certain age’, I withdrew from the labour market temporarily to focus on caring for six months when in my mid-50s. When looking to re-enter the world of work, I decided that this was an opportunity to squeeze one more sideways move into a long CV and that it was time to try something new. But how to approach it and who’d want a newbie in their mid-50s?
As a first step, I went through an exercise to identify the elements of my past roles that had best suited my strengths. I then looked both at sectors and specific jobs that valued those strengths. At my stage in life, I realised that I had no appetite to start from scratch completely and go through significant retraining so focused on sectors related to where I had worked previously, rather than a massive jump into the unknown. Having come from a charity operations background, I also quickly realised that the social value of organisations and sectors was also of primary importance to me.
Social policy research sat in the middle of the Venn diagram I had created, ticking both the interest and value box as well as the strengths box, although my research skill set clearly had big holes. The key was to start to articulate the value I could bring to an organisation, thinking about where skills overlapped. I also realised that I needed to engage in some directed self-learning to start to plug some of those skills gaps. No matter what your topic, there’s a YouTube channel or an industry sector body to match it and I found some excellent online learning and courses via the to help me start to turn my peripheral vision into my main goal.
Next came the CV. When I first started job hunting again through recruitment agencies and job sites, I was only sent job adverts that were carbon copies of the job I’d just left. There didn’t seem to be any room for those that might want or need to try something different. I had to really focus on making my CV highlight my skills and strengths rather than my job history whilst acknowledging that while I might have shortcomings, I was hungry to learn and had extensive work experience.
Following on from the CV it was time for more research, this time to find organisations that would be open to the idea of bringing someone in who may have a CV that might seem a bit leftfield. This took some reverse marketing (proactively approaching organisations, even those not advertising live vacancies) and networking to unearth organisations that might have a positive response to being approached by an older worker, or which had publicly articulated their openness to older workers through their recruitment pages and values. The Centre for Ageing Better has an Age-friendly Employer Pledge, which can be a good place to start to look for likely employers.
I am now two and a half years into my new career in social policy research. It’s been a huge learning curve but everyone is eager to share their enthusiasm and their extensive knowledge and skills. Working with young, talented researchers has been invigorating and those that have been with the organisation for longer have been supportive and given me the space to learn and grow.
Whilst working with younger colleagues certainly adds a valuable energy and different perspectives to many workplace scenarios, research continually indicates that older workers bring much value to the job too. IES contributed to this report for OECD which debunks several myths and demonstrates the positive impact of age diversity and inclusion on a firm’s long-term competitive growth and organisational resilience.
If you or your employer would like to learn more about how IES can assist your organisation in reaping a wide array of benefits through developing an age-inclusive workplace strategy, we would be keen to hear from you. Just drop us an email and we will be happy to discuss further: [email protected]
Any views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute as a whole.