One important reason for choosing to make a midlife Career Change is that you feel you really haven’t reached your potential, that there is much more you can do.

The disadvantage of making career decisions at 18 or 21 is that you don’t know much about the labour market and so you often have to rely on other people’s advise or opinions.

In addition to which, most schools don’t give very detailed or individually tailored careers guidance and so it is hardly surprising that most of us make our decisions based on limitation and lack of information.

So it’s not surprising that after 10 or 20 years in the workforce you begin to feel that life might have been very different. Your current career is not providing much in the way of job satisfaction. If only you had followed your dream or studied what you wanted to learn, rather than gearing your efforts towards “getting a real job”? Where might you be now?

Midlife career change might be scary, but it’s also an adventure. You know a lot more about work, you have a much better idea of what you really want from work and perhaps more importantly, what you don’t want. You understand just how big a role your job plays in your life and you want to get it right this time.

So it’s time to reassess your career and create a future which is more fun, and also more fulfilling, allowing you to express your talents and use your skills.

But it isn’t easy to make big changes – there are quite a few risks involved. It’s often easy enough to decide what you’d rather like to do, but if you need to retrain, without the promise of a job at the end, it can be tough.

One way to approach this situation , is to look beyond the traditional work patterns we are used to and think about self employment and the possibility of a portfolio career.

A portfolio career can be a great choice as a midlife career change, because it gives you the opprotunity to make change slowly and it gives you the chance to work in more than one area, which in turn allows you to use different skills. This is a big advantage, especially if you have several very different ideas that you would like to pursue. One of the worst drawbacks of a normal job is that it can be impossible to find all that you want in one job. So a variety of different jobs, incorporating self employment, will give you a much better chance of finding fulfillment at work.

As with any career change, changing direction in midlife is something which takes time, thought and preparation. Luckily, this is much easier these days with the internet which will enable you to get information,, find contacts and even set up one or more income streams without leaving home!

Discover how to set up your own portfolio career at http://www.coolercareers.com/portfolio-careers.html and get started on our 6 Step Guide to Midlife Career Change today.

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