Suddenly, you’re questioning everything you’ve decided yourself for the past decade or so. A few months ago, your life goals made perfect sense to you, but now, everything feels shallow and unrecognizable. Every day fills you with dread at the simple thought that you’re heading towards a wall. But you’re not sure you have the strength and the energy to consider a new option. However, you still surprise yourself with spontaneous and impulsive decisions that push you in completely unexplored territories. Congratulations, you’ve got yourself your very own mid-life crisis.

Typically, the transition of identity and self-confidence that marks the crisis can happen at any point between your late 20s and your mid-60s. In other words, a mid-life crisis doesn’t mean that you need to have reached your silver years. Some Millennials are already going through a similar turmoil! 

But, thankfully, being still young when you hit that point of your life means that you can rely on your job to help you out. Instead, as a professional, you spend most of your waking hours at work. Therefore, the best way to tackle the crisis is to consider what changes you could make to your day-to-day activities. 

Why should you stay in a job that isn’t you anymore?

When your priorities change, it’s always a good idea to consider how it affects your job. When you’re not sure about your career choice anymore, you need to take the time to come up with a better option. Don’t just sign up to a job portal to browse the different offers available. Start by taking a career test to figure out what would be best suited to your strengths and weaknesses as well as your personality. Admittedly, a career quiz is unlikely to give you the solution to your problem. But it can highlight paths you would never have considered otherwise. 

You want to matter 

More often than not, people who want to change careers are trying to make a change to the world. It doesn’t matter what tips the balance over, whether it was a crying child in the doctor’s waiting room or coping with a traumatic experience, you might wake up one morning wishing to find out more about caring careers. How can you help others to live a better life? Counseling can be a rewarding option to help people deal with emotional issues, for instance – and only requires a couple of years of training. 

It’s time to have fun at work!

You’ve spent enough hours in a dull working environment. You want a business that fills people with joy. You want to excite, amuse, and entertain. While it might take years to become a professional and successful comedian, other entertainment alternatives can prove profitable as a business venture. Indeed, opening an escape room company is hitting the trend at the right time. Great rooms generate a decent ROI, and, more importantly, they put a smile on your customers’ faces. More and more professionals give up their office job to create fun puzzles and rooms. 

Changing jobs isn’t always the best solution to your mid-life crisis. However, it can help you to channel the changes you need to follow your new goals. Whether you want to make a difference, to entertain people, or to enjoy your activities, finding a career that defines you puts an end to your crisis.

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Please welcome guest blogger Joy Miller to Perfectly Employed! Joy Miller is the founder of MyDegreeGuide.com and specializes in matching students with accredited universities offering online degrees at an accelerated pace.

If you wake up every day wishing that you’d chosen a different career path, it may be time for your life to head in a new direction. Don’t let the fact that you’re over 40 dissuade you from switching careers. 

Although a mid-life job change presents challenges, advance planning and preparation can help you navigate the shift.

1. Take a Career Test

The first step to getting out of a career that you don’t want is to figure out what you do want to do. 

Career aptitude tests can be quite informative and may provide job ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.

Related: Career Fitter Career and Personality Test Review

Give one of these online assessments a try:

To get the best results, you may have to be honest with yourself about some of your strengths and weaknesses.

2. Explore the Occupations on Your List

Of course, just because a digital quiz suggests a particular career path for you, that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best fit for you. Online searches and library reading can help you research several options.

Consider talking to people who are already employed in those fields. You may even be able to shadow some workers to get a feel for what a day on the job is like.

3. Leverage Your Past Work Experience

Beginning a new career after age 40 can feel like you’re starting from scratch. But the truth of the matter is that you already have a good deal of work experience under your belt.

Do your best to capitalize on the strengths that you’ve already developed. Make a list of your strengths and the areas in which you excel. Brainstorm ways that you could put each strength to work in a different setting.

4. Gather Job Information

Once you’ve settled on a field that interests you, it’s time to consider specific roles. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website is a great source for gathering information about different types of work. You can look up information about a job’s earning potential, expected growth, required education and general responsibilities. 

As you consider salary amounts, keep in mind that you might be starting out at the low end of the pay scale. However, once you invest time and effort into your new career, you’ll eventually start moving toward the other end of the range.

5. Adapt Your Resume for Each Job

Finally, remember that each job that you apply for will be a bit different. So, your resume should shift a bit, too.

Do you have a college degree? What aspects of your education transfer to the new position to which you are applying? Try to find areas of crossover that you can highlight for potential employers.

Next, think about the strengths that you wrote down on your earlier list. Pick out the ones that best apply to each job’s responsibilities. Then, you can be sure to highlight those skills and abilities on that particular version of your resume.

Moving Forward

Changing jobs partway through your working years can be nerve-wracking. However, when you approach your job search with the right attitude, you may end up finding a career that keeps you satisfied all the way to retirement.

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Could You Work in a Customer Facing Role? #career #careeradvice

Are you fresh out of college? Or have you been working in your current career for more than a decade? It’s never the wrong time to reconsider your work life options. You might feel stuck in a rut, your job might not be satisfying you, or you might not know where to go to apply for your first entry-level position. Many roles nowadays have an element of customer service. This can range from the telephone receptionist in a law firm to a social media manager who is conversing with clients over online platforms for eight hours a day. Customer facing doesn’t necessarily mean seeing another human physically. It could simply mean having contact with people through a variety of means. Being a customer facing does require specific attributes. Have you got what it takes?

Patience

Often being in a customer facing role means being the first point of contact for those people who are eager to make a complaint. It could be as simple as not having had their item arrive on time or more serious issues of misconduct and negligence. You need to be able to maintain a calm facade no matter what thoughts are racing through your head. Try to empathize with the customer and put yourself in their shoes. Imagine ordering a present for a significant birthday with plenty of time to spare only for it not to turn up. Be patient and allow the customer to rant if they have to. When there is a gap, interject and sympathize. Make it clear that you will take their complaint seriously. Detail how you will escalate the complaint and make sure you keep them informed of any progress and developments.

Sales

Customer facing roles often mean being motivated by sales and money making initiatives. If someone telephones your company enquiring about an offer they have seen on a social media platform, it might be up to you to secure the sale. If you streamline your sales process and ensure that every member of the company follows the same approach, the brand can gain a reputation for exceptional customer care rather than pushy sales tactics. Cold calling is no longer thought of as a suitable approach to earning revenue. However enticing customers to be more active in the sales process to make the first move has proven profitable.

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Communication Skills

Sometimes you will be talking to people over the telephone, at other times you might be emailing to respond to an inquiry, and at other points, you might be responding to a Twitter post or Instagram comment. Adapting your tone and voice for each method of communicationand for each customer type is a skill. Get this right, and you could find yourself with an exceptional reputation for customer service, find yourself with positive reviews online and with more traffic to your company’s website to convert to sales.
Customer facing roles are no longer lesser qualified jobs. They encompass every tier of a firm and every sector of the industry. If you have what it takes, consider applying your skills to a customer facing role.

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Unless you have an abusive boss or obnoxious coworkers, it can be hard to tell when it’s time for a career change. If your work has become monotonous, it might be time to consider changing careers.

While some people stay in the same career all of their lives and they enjoy it, most people change careers at least three times. That’s not jobs, that’s careers. Here are three signs that it might be time to start looking for a new line of work:

You Want to Work from Home

This is one of the main reasons why people are changing their careers today. They are tired of having to drive to and from work every day when they hear about an increasing number of people that are working from home. Of course, you may have other reasons for wanting to do this, for example, you may have recently had a baby. Either way, there are many ways you can work from home today. You can learn how to day trade for a living, for example, or you can take on freelance jobs, provide online lessons and tutorials for people, start your own blog, and so on.

You are not Learning Anymore

Aside from wanting to work from home, another sign that you should look into changing your career is if you find that you are not acquiring new skills and experience in the workplace any more. This suggests that you need a change. Whether this is a new career or simply a new job is up to you. However, you must recognize that you are going to leave a big hole in your CV if you do not develop practical skills and add new qualifications to your CV over time.

You are Bored 

A final clear sign that it is time for a career change is if you have grown bored with your job. Of course, it is natural to have bored periods from time-to-time. No matter how much you love your career, there are going to be tasks and elements of the job that are boring. Nevertheless, if you find that this feeling does not seem to be going away no matter what you do, it is definitely time for a change. After all, you are going to spend the vast majority of your life working, and so it is only right that you are doing something enjoyable that makes you happy.

Related: 

As you can see, there are a number of different indicators that now is a good time for a career change. If you have noticed any of the signs that have been mentioned above, you may be feeling a little bit scared regarding what lies ahead. But there is no need to panic. You should start thinking about what you really want from your career so that you can make the required changes to achieve this.

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When you feel like your current career is doing nothing for you and you’ve taken things as far as they can go, you should think about what you can do to push further and find a way forward that fulfills you. For most people, this means making a career change and finding a new job that offers new challenges and new opportunities to you. That’s certainly a daunting prospect to face up to, but it’s often the right way forward.

The most important part of making a big career change is taking those first few steps. When you do this, you’re able to start your journey and force yourself to start taking action. If you know that you need a change, it makes sense to simply push for it and make it happen. Why wait around if you know that nothing’s going to change? Read on to learn about what you can do to take the first steps towards a brand new career.

Give Yourself Time to Think About This Change

First of all, you need to think about the change and what it will mean for you. There are lots of things that will be different once you take on a new job and a new career path. For a start, you will want to make sure that your new job you aim for pays as much as your current job. If that’s not the case, you will end up struggling to pay the mortgage and the bills each month.

Set Aims for Your Career Progression

You should have some clear aims and goals for your career progression because when you have that, you’re able to make sure that you’re always moving in the right direction and not standing still. It’s very easy to say you’re going to make big changes in your career and then not do much at all. That’s never the way it should be so set goals and clearly move in the right direction from this point onwards. It’s what’ll be best for you in the end.

Seek the Right Qualifications

You should always be looking to seek the right qualifications before you try to apply for new jobs. You’ll only get turned down if you don’t have the expected qualifications in place and ready to show employers. If you want to be a nurse, for instances, you’re going to have to find nursing schools where you can get training before you expect any medical facilities to hire you. That’s just the way it is for many jobs, so be willing to put in the work.

Get Some Experience

Finding ways to gain experience will certainly help you a lot when it comes to pushing forward with a new career path. You will only struggle to gain jobs if you have no relevant experience. You could volunteer or pursue internships to begin with if you want to gain this experience. It definitely makes sense for a lot of people. Or you could just start at the bottom with an entry level position and be willing to work your way up from there?

Believe in Your Abilities to do the Job You Want to Do

You should always believe in your abilities and your ability to do the job that you actually want to do. There are so many great ways to improve your confidence, but it all comes down to believing in your own abilities. If you don’t believe in yourself and you’re not sure that you’ve got what it takes to succeed, why would anyone else believe in you? That’s the question you should ask yourself. Try to believe in yourself and what you’re doing.

Make Use of Any Transferable Skills You Have

You should think about which skills you have that might transfer to the new job that you want to do. Not all skills can be ignored and thrown away just because you’re changing your career. Things like tech skills and good communication skills are assets in just about every job nowadays, so make sure that you highlight those kinds of transferable skills when you’re looking to switch career and get a new job. It will really pay off for you in the end.

Work on Your CV

It’s a good idea to start working on your CV before you make this career change. If your CV hasn’t changed much in the last few years, it’s probably terribly out of date by now. You should make sure that it’s completely up to date and ready to impress anyone who might want to read it. It should also be geared towards the kinds of jobs that you want to do because that’s the only way to secure the right job in the future.

Prove Yourself

Proving yourself is tough, but when you get a chance in a new career, you need to make sure that you don’t disappoint. When someone takes a chance on you, especially when you don’t have much experience to back yourself up, you need to repay that trust as soon as you can. Doing so will reassure them that they’ve made the right decision and that they can trust you to perform to the highest standards.

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Don’t Wait Around Forever

Finally, you should remember the importance of pushing ahead, even when it’s scary and daunting to do so. If you just wait around forever and keep talking about changes without ever actually carrying them out, you will end up getting nothing at all done, and that’s not the way it should be at all. Be brave and grab the bull by the horns.

A career change is something that we all feel a need to push ahead with at one time or other in our lives. You should make sure that you stay true to yourself and make that change happen if you feel that you passionately need to go in a new direction in your career. It’ll be a challenge, but it could be worth it.

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