Planning A Second Career After Retirement

If you’re lucky enough to be retiring at a reasonably early age, say 55 or less, you may be planning a second career after retirement. Many people do. Every month, more “young” baby boomers retire from jobs in the military or from working for federal, state or local governmental agencies. Many of these people won’t want to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs and are planning a second career after retirement.

How to plan a second career

Have you already decided what your second career will be? If so, good for you.  If you have not yet decided what that second career will be, there are several questions you need to ask yourself.

1.How much money do you want to earn? If you’re retiring with a healthy-sized pension, money may be a secondary consideration. Conversely, if you are worried about the size of your retirement portfolio, you may want to plan for a second career where the major criteria are how much money you will make. If money is only a secondary consideration, the good news is that you can plan for a second career where you are doing something you really enjoy.

2.  Health insurance–as you know, health insurance for you and your family is becoming more expensive every year. Plus, it’s hard to tell what’s going to really happen to health care in the future–given all the politics surrounding it. So, when planning a second career after retirement, you might want to look for a job where the employer provides healthcare insurance at a reasonable cost. Again, if you are only 55 years old (or even younger), there will be a gap–10 years or more–before you are eligible for Medicare. This could make healthcare insurance very important criteria for you in planning a second career after retirement.

 

3.Geographic location. When planning a second career after retirement, you can decide to stay where you are or relocate–since you are no longer tied to a job. You may have been daydreaming for the past few years about moving to the Sunbelt or to a small town.

However, this may not jibe with a second career as that Sunbelt city or small town might not have jobs available.  Fortunately, there are cities that offer a relatively low cost of living and have jobs. This is especially true in the states of North and South Carolina and, to a lesser degree, Florida.

If you’re not married to the idea of living in a Sunbelt state, there are some nice, smaller-sized cities where you could find work such as Columbus, Ohio and Lincoln, Nebraska. Des Moines, Iowa also offers a low cost of living and is the home of more insurance companies then you can shake a stick at–which means lots of job opportunities.

Other towns that qualify as good places to retire and have a second career include Portland Oregon, Fort Collins, Colorado, Hendersonville, North Carolina and Boulder Colorado.  If you are determined to move to a Sunbelt city, good choices for a low cost of living and decent job opportunities are Asheville, North Carolina, Austin Texas, Boca Raton, Florida, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Gainesville, Florida.

Do a skills assessment

In planning a second career after retirement, it is important to do a skills assessment before charging off to look for that new job. Either get a clean piece of paper or jump on your computer and start listing your skills and areas of expertise. You can go back as far as 30 years but may not want to go much beyond that as any skills you learned prior to 1980 may already be obsolete.

Your skills could include items such as project management, human resources, accounting, marketing, sales, technical writing, engineering and on and on. When you list those skills, write a paragraph under each skill describing exactly what you did to utilize it.  For example, if you listed sales as one of your skills, you could describe what you did as “prospecting for new business, contacting customers, serving as a sales engineer, writing contracts, preparing proposals, etc.”

By doing a skills assessment, you should be able to develop a very good idea of what your second career could be.  As a worse case scenario, you could discover that there is a big disconnect between what you would like to do and what you are prepared to do. Your heartfelt dream might be to operate an upscale bed and breakfast, but if you don’t have the skills required to cook, manage people, order supplies, and handle the required accounting, you might be smart to look in a different direction for that second career.

Create a resume that will hone in on that job like a laser

A skills assessment will also help you develop the resume you’ll need if you will be looking for a job. Also, keep in mind that you will want to create a resume that you can rework to fit different kinds of jobs. Your resume is most often your “first impression” with a prospective employer, and it needs to be designed specifically for that job and that employer.

If you are applying for a job in sales, you darn well better have a resume that reflects good experience selling. Employers today often receive hundreds of resumes for any job due to our unemployment rate. You need to find ways to make your resume stand out and have that prospective employer jumping up and down to interview you.

Planning a second career after retirement isn’t as easy as some people might think. But if you do your homework and plan carefully, you can have a second career that will be profitable, interesting and enjoyable.