The following is a transcript of our monthly podcast, The Pension Confident Podcast. Listen to episode 38 or scroll on to read the conversation.
Takeaways from this episode
- Career change is increasingly common - societal shifts and evolving job markets are leading more people to consider and make significant career transitions.
- Transferable skills are key - identifying and leveraging existing skills can smooth the transition into a new field, even if the industries seem vastly different.
- Age presents both challenges and opportunities - while older career changers might face biases, their accumulated experience and soft skills are highly valuable.
- Thorough financial planning is non-negotiable - carefully assessing affordability, budgeting, and understanding long-term financial implications are critical steps.
- Exploration and self-reflection are vital - considering personal interests, values, and even pastimes can uncover unexpected and fulfilling career possibilities.
- Taking action, even small steps, builds momentum - overcoming inertia and actively exploring options is crucial for turning the desire for change into reality.
PHILIPPA: Hi, welcome back. Were you at work today? How was it? Same old, same old? Well, maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe it’s time to do something completely new. Work is work, right? We all have good days and bad days. But if you’re stuck in a job that bores you, or you’ve hit your earnings ceiling, or you can’t work as flexibly, maybe, as you’d like - you don’t have to sit there and take it.
Since the [COVID-19] pandemic, about four million Brits have already taken that leap: they’ve changed careers. And with [artificial intelligence] (AI) putting some jobs at risk, another 285,000 people might have to make that switch as soon as 2030. Now, of course, changing careers, it’s a big step. Especially if you’ve spent years in one industry. Where can you find tools and guidance to help you? And, because we always want you to be thinking about your financial future, how can you keep your money on track?
I’m Philippa Lamb, and if you haven’t already subscribed to The Pension Confident Podcast - why not click right now so you never miss an episode? We’re talking about career change. Here with me, I have Suzanne Noble, she’s the Co-Founder of the Startup School for Seniors. Hannah Martin is here, too. She’s the Founder of the Talented Ladies Club. And from PensionBee this time, we have Senior Software Engineer, Anindya Bhattacharyya - better known as Bat. Hello, everyone.
BAT: Hi there.
HANNAH: Hello.
SUZANNE: Hello.
PHILIPPA: Here’s the usual disclaimer before we start. Please do remember, anything discussed on the podcast shouldn’t be regarded as financial advice or legal advice. And when investing, your capital is at risk.
What would your instant career swap be?
PHILIPPA: Now look, I want to ask all of you, if you had the chance to swap careers right now, no retraining required, what would your dream job be?
SUZANNE: I’d be a travel blogger.
PHILIPPA: Would you?
SUZANNE: Yes.
PHILIPPA: Yeah, that’s quite a tempting thought, isn’t it? Being paid -
SUZANNE: - just being paid to travel. That’s what I’d do, yeah.
PHILIPPA: Mine is quite similar actually I think, I’d sit at home all day and write novels. That really sounds very appealing to me. Any others?
BAT: Yeah, go somewhere hot. I think. Go, go work somewhere hot.
PHILIPPA: Doing?
BAT: Something that’s not strenuous - reading? Something like that. Can you get paid for that?
PHILIPPA: That’s not a job. Well, proofreading, maybe.
BAT: I used to do that. That is strenuous - and badly paid.
HANNAH: I’d be a private eye because it’s got travel, digging up secrets. Every day is different. It’d be quite exciting. I’d love it.
Transferable skills and portfolio careers
PHILIPPA: We’re talking here about not just finding a new job, we’re talking about finding a whole new career. There’s a lot to think about, but a lot more people do it now. [The] data says a lot more people do it. Why do we think that is?
HANNAH: I think we have a much more portfolio idea of careers. Certainly, when I was younger, people would expect to see you stay in the same job for four or five years. If you moved jobs every year or so, your CV would look really bad. But I think today, it’s the opposite, actually. If you interviewed someone who’d been in one job for eight years, you’d question why they’d stayed there. I think culturally, we do change careers a lot more than we used to, at least jobs, and that would extend to careers as well, potentially.
PHILIPPA: So, it’s attitudinal then. Bat?
BAT: I think the thing about changes in society driving it, that was certainly the case for me. I trained as a Journalist and newspapers were an integral feature of people’s lives. Britain had the second-highest newspaper readership in the world after Japan. Everybody read a paper. You might as well describe a horse and cart to young people nowadays.
PHILIPPA: That’s so true.
BAT: That’s just completely changed.
PHILIPPA: So, when did you change?
BAT: 2014, 2015. After a period of extremely ineffectual freelancing, I decided “no, come on”. I learned to code. I was always interested in tinkering about, hobbying, hobbyist computing. It wasn’t a massive jump for me, but I went off and did a 12-week boot camp course and retrained as a Programmer and then joined PensionBee shortly thereafter.
PHILIPPA: It’s a big change, isn’t it? I mean, they’re very different jobs.
BAT: You’d have thought so. They’re culturally presented as quite different, but I’m actually quite surprised at the number of random skills that transfer. I mean, like being able to spot where a semicolon is missing in a block of text is a skill that transfers from newspaper journalism to -
PHILIPPA: - to coding.
BAT: To coding, yes.
The end of the 40-year career
PHILIPPA: I get it. I mean, I guess other common reasons back in the day, it always used to be people moved jobs, at least, and sometimes careers, because they really didn’t like their boss. That was top of the list, wasn’t it? Do we think it’s often about high stress work?
SUZANNE: When you’ve got quite complex lives nowadays where a lot of the people that I know have caring responsibilities, they just can’t cope with the intense work that they’re being asked to perform.
PHILIPPA: So, the combination of pressures.
SUZANNE: They’re looking at their life and thinking: “I just can’t fundamentally deal with all of this. I’ve got to go visit my mum this weekend because she’s having problems. I might still have a kid at home“. This whole ‘sandwich generation‘ now is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. With that comes a lot of different types of responsibilities.
PHILIPPA: I think there’s quite a lot in that.
HANNAH: I think. Also, there’s more of an expectation today that we should enjoy what we do.
PHILIPPA: Yes, true.
HANNAH: This idea, again, a job for life, you just stick with it for better or worse. But today, we don’t have to do that. If work is intolerable, the idea that you must stay there and put in that time - isn’t there. It gives you more freedom to make that move, I think, or more permission.
PHILIPPA: We’ve got higher expectations, haven’t we?
HANNAH: We do.
PHILIPPA: We want to enjoy our work.
HANNAH: We should.
PHILIPPA: When I think about our grandparents, a job is a job, right? It’s just about the money. But now it’s about a whole bunch of other stuff, isn’t it? Work has changed a lot, as we said in the last 20 years. We’re generally thinking then that it’s easier to make a switch now?
HANNAH: In some ways, the more choice you have, the harder it is. I think because especially with remote working, the idea that you have to look for jobs in your town no longer exists. The whole world literally is your oyster, potentially.
PHILIPPA: Sure.
HANNAH: I think that creates extra pressure. All this idea with social media and people posting about how much they love their lives -
PHILIPPA: Oh, yes. Everyone else’s ‘perfect life’.
HANNAH: Exactly. If you’re not loving what you do, then you’re thinking: “there’s something wrong with me. But then what do I do? Because there’s a million things I could do”. I think in some ways; it’s a bit harder.
Most common age for making a career switch
PHILIPPA: I was interested to see that the most common age for switching is 31. Why do we think that is?
SUZANNE: I was going to say it must be early 30s because you’ve got some experience behind you. You have a much clearer idea of the direction in which you might want to go and you’re still viewed as having lots of energy, lots of enthusiasm, being able to pick up technology quickly.
I know that it takes a person over 50 at least twice as long as any other age group to get a job once they’ve left their former job. So switching isn’t easy. And often it’s switching into consultancy or switching into self-employment or switching into something where they have more control over what they do every day rather than switching into a full-time role - because frankly, they’re just not available.
PHILIPPA: Interesting.
BAT: I actually did a sort of mini switch at 31.
PHILIPPA: Did you?
BAT: Yes, because in my 20s, I was a Financial Journalist and I wrote about technology in the city, which was quite lucrative, but also very boring at parties. I think in my early 30s, I was just too bored of it. I’d just been doing nothing but that for 10 years. I’d figured out how it all worked, which was the curiosity. You need curiosity to be a Journalist, and that had gone. I switched into much more general news.
PHILIPPA: A mini career switch?
BAT: Yeah.
Pitching yourself as an older employee
PHILIPPA: But as you say, doing it older can be much, much tougher. It’s just the way it is. There’s no point denying it. What can we say that’s useful there? How would you pitch the idea of yourself as an older worker to a new employer?
SUZANNE: Ah, that’s a good question. I think what people fail to realise is that lots of their skills are transferable, as you said.
PHILIPPA: What things are we talking about?
SUZANNE: Soft skills, especially. Being able to work with people, being able to manage people, knowing how to run departments, for instance, which are skills that are developed over time as you go up through the hierarchy of, say, a corporate environment. Those sort of skills can be useful in lots of different environments and often they’re underestimated by people who are trying to switch roles. I also think that just generally, the people that I come across, the thing that they lack is confidence. Because they look at some of these ways, new ways of being interviewed, these automated ways where they just have to speak into a computer and answer questions.
PHILIPPA: Everyone hates that, don’t they?
SUZANNE: Yeah, but I suspect that if you haven’t ever done it before and you’re looking at this person with wrinkles now and applying for jobs, then that can be quite scary.
PHILIPPA: Yeah.
SUZANNE: Also, what people fail to realise is that they can retrain. I think there’s this assumption that older people are slower in picking up technology. Older people can’t use the internet. I mean, we invented the internet!
PHILIPPA: It’d be weird if you were in your 50s and you couldn’t use the internet.
SUZANNE: But I do find people say to me, “I’ve never used Zoom before”. And I say to them, “you know what? You’re going to click that link right now”. They say, “is that all I have to do?”. And I say, “that’s all you have to do. Your camera’s turned on, your mic is on. Look, here you are”.
PHILIPPA: You’re good to go.
Retraining for a new role
PHILIPPA: But if we’re talking about actual retraining for a role, how easy is it to access retraining when you’re older? Because we think of training as stuff that people do at the beginning of their careers or in a job role. If you’re starting cold at, I don’t know, post-50, what’s out there for you?
SUZANNE: I mean, there’s lots of - You work in technology. There’s a huge amount of free courses available via Google, for instance. In learning AI, learning cybersecurity, learning some of the new skills that people are going to need to know for this new environment of work, like artificial intelligence, for instance.
So Udemy, Coursera - there’s so many platforms now where they’ll teach you these skills: learning social media, social media management, content creation. I mean, there’s a host of opportunities to retrain in all of these fields, and none of them are particularly difficult.
PHILIPPA: And that’s what you did, Bat. You did it online?
BAT: No.
PHILIPPA: No?
BAT: No. I found that I had a decent hobbyist knowledge. I’d done a few courses, but no employer was going to hire a Junior Programmer with zero experience, who was in his 40s, who’d been a newspaper Journalist for the past 20 years. I had to go and do the boot camp and that’s what taught me the career skills. That’s what got me the first job.
PHILIPPA: What did you learn at this boot camp?
BAT: What was expected of a Junior Programmer? What tools do you use? What are the standard industry techniques? Which, of course, were completely different from the last time I programmed a computer professionally - which would’ve been 25 years previously.
PHILIPPA: OK.
BAT: That map of the territory that I was going into I found the most [useful]. Because that’s the bit I was useless at. I’ve never been very good at the hustle of job interviews. I spent about six months just firing off interview applications, having made the decision to switch, before I came across that [boot camp].
HANNAH: I think retraining at any age, you need the same thing. You need to be resourceful. You need to go outside your comfort zone. You need to take risks. You need to leverage your network. I don’t think in a way it’s any different if you’re 50, 55 or 30. I think you’re going to have to put yourself out there. You’re going to have to research. You’re going to have to do some groundwork yourself.
PHILIPPA: So, it’s mindset?
HANNAH: It is. Absolutely, yes.
PHILIPPA: I guess if you’re highly motivated, you can find that, can’t you? But in practical terms, I’m thinking about things like apprenticeships. Are there any age limits around those? You think of them as something for young people, don’t you?
SUZANNE: Some apprenticeships have age limits -
PHILIPPA: They do?
SUZANNE: - and some of them don’t.
PHILIPPA: They shouldn’t, should they? Why do they have age limits? Because when you think about it, when we have anti-age discrimination legislation, so I’m wondering why there’s age limits on things like apprenticeships. Because ideally, you should be able to retrain at any stage, shouldn’t you?
BAT: When I was young, I remember growing up and Open University was on BBC Two. And there was this future promised, of higher education, all of this stuff would just be delivered to everyone universally over these hot new technologies like television. Has that really happened? I just feel that given the potential, what we have is a fraction of what - We could live in a world where it’s perfectly normal to just start a degree in literature in your late 40s at the local poly[technic college].
Can you afford to switch careers?
PHILIPPA: This does bring us to the crunch question, doesn’t it? Can you afford it? Because it’s all very well. We can sit here and say, “wouldn’t it be great if I was a novelist and wouldn’t it be great if you were sitting on a beach?” and, as I understand it, Bat, not really doing anything but getting paid is the plan.
But more realistically, there’s a lot of groundwork to do on the money front, isn’t there, before you think about this? Particularly if you’re doing it when you’re a bit older, because at that stage, most of us have financial responsibilities. So, thinking about training, I guess it’s worth remembering, you don’t necessarily have to give up the job or career you’ve got right now in order to retrain, do you? So, talk to me about options there. I’m guessing there’s quite a lot you can do.
SUZANNE: For the people that I teach who want to start something for themselves, I always say to them, “the best time for you to do it is when you’re still in work. Because you’ve got that financial security and you can start playing with this idea that you’ve got, which you might have had for years, but without that fear that suddenly your income is just going to disappear”.
If you’re not in work and you’re thinking about, again, moving into something for yourself, then I always advise people that it’s not going to be quick. That starting up on your own, you’re generally looking at a two-year window in which you’re going to be building up your salary slowly to try to get it to the point, whatever point that is that you’re looking for.
Now, not everybody wants to replace their full-time salary, especially when they’re older. They might have some savings, they might have a pension, for instance, and wanting to supplement that, but it’s never going to be quick. The longer you have as a runway to move into that place that you want to get to, the better. Because I suspect that for a lot of people, they think that it’s just going to be this instant thing, and they’re suddenly going to make all that money. Then when they don’t, there’s a huge amount of disappointment that comes with that, and often people then give up.
PHILIPPA: Yeah and get very dispirited.
HANNAH: I think that there’s a lot of messaging around today, again, on social media about how easy it is to make money. How people are making six figures instantly, and it just doesn’t work like that. I totally agree. It takes quite a long time. But also as a counterpoint to that, because there won’t be people listening who don’t maybe have the luxury of long-term planning, is that sometimes when you have a safety net, if you plan too well, you never really take risks. Because it’s like if you were learning to fly the trapeze and you had a safety net underneath you, if you fall, you’re going to live. But if there was no safety net, you’d learn a lot faster -
PHILIPPA: Or die.
HANNAH: - because you’d make that much sure. Sometimes we can plan too much, and we can get too stuck in the, “I’m only going to make the move when it’s perfect”.
Financial checklist before making the leap
PHILIPPA: I must say I’m a real planner, just by nature. A risk taker, but a planner. It’s a planned risk, isn’t it? It’s that whole thing of sitting down and evaluating where your finances are, what your absolutely unavoidable outgoings are, all the usual budgetary stuff we often talk about on the podcast. What money do you have to have? How much less could you manage on?
Because think about long-term consequences of this. Obviously, there’s loads of positives we can think about, but I’m going to raise all these cautious things like, most people have a - It’s a workplace pension. So, if they ditch their job, those contributions stop. And that’s going to have a serious knock-on effect when you’re older.
You’re not going to feel it right away. But so those things need to be factored into your thinking, don’t they? And can you maintain pension contributions yourself, even when you’re retraining, even if it’s at a lower level? Do you find people think about that thing, Suzanne, or do they just want to leap, or they just have to leap.
SUZANNE: We do actually bring in Pension Advisers to give talks to people -
PHILIPPA: Do you?
SUZANNE: - about the impact of all of this on their pension. It’s not something that’s commonly spoken about.
PHILIPPA: No.
SUZANNE: When you realise what the impact could be, it’s substantial.
PHILIPPA: Yeah, you might have medical insurance.
SUZANNE: Exactly.
PHILIPPA: There’s all sorts of benefits. Workplace benefits can just disappear, admittedly, maybe just for a period of time. But they’re gone, aren’t they?
SUZANNE: Exactly. I don’t think people think about this enough. They just jump into things sometimes without thinking about the consequences.
PHILIPPA: Do you sit them down and teach them how to budget, essentially, how to create a budget for this move?
SUZANNE: Absolutely. Yeah. We ask them to look at their overheads. We ask them to look at what their day-to-day expenses look like. We ask them to look at - We ask them to put together basically a financial plan, a very simple financial plan, but a financial plan, nonetheless. Then we ask them to create an action plan so that they can think about what are those steps that they need to take to get to where they want to be.
Finding possible funding opportunities
PHILIPPA: Realistic planning about this budget, about this financial plan, and what you can realistically expect to earn when you’ve actually established yourself. It’s quite hard to know what that number is, isn’t it?
HANNAH: But if you don’t know, you’re walking blindly, aren’t you? You could spend five years devoting yourself to getting there and then finding out that it was never something that was sustainable for you.
SUZANNE: Absolutely.
PHILIPPA: I guess that’s where things like teaching, retraining as a teacher, that’s quite helpful because you can look at salary bands. You have a reasonable expectation of understanding what you’re likely to earn. Or for you, Bat.
BAT: Yeah.
PHILIPPA: Presumably, you knew what you could potentially earn.
BAT: In terms of funding the course, I took out a ‘Careers Development Loan‘. Even with someone with a slightly spotty credit history, because it was a loan tied to careers development, the bank was like, “OK, he’s going to get a job. Fine”.
PHILIPPA: Have you got platforms you can recommend for where people would go to find out about money, grants, the stuff they could apply for?
SUZANNE: I myself got a startup loan years ago.
PHILIPPA: From the bank?
SUZANNE: From Virgin StartUp, which are still there. Startup loans are still available, so that’s good. They’re one of the few loans available. If you’re looking at starting a business and you have a bit of a spotty credit history.
HANNAH: They give you a mentor as well.
SUZANNE: And they give you a mentor.
HANNAH: They still do that.
PHILIPPA: Do they?
SUZANNE: There are grants if you want to set up social enterprise businesses through funds like Unlimited or School of Social Entrepreneurs is another one, or the Big Lottery also [does] grants. There aren’t that many business loans available, sadly, anymore. If you want to set up a business, probably startup loans are one of the few that’s more readily available.
Available support for getting started
PHILIPPA: I’m thinking about people who are listening to this thinking, “I really hate my job. I’d love to do this, but I’m not quite sure what I should aim at”. Where would we suggest they go to game out a few career ideas, think what might suit them? Is it free? I mean, there must be. There must be loads of stuff online they could do where they could test their suitability for alternative careers.
SUZANNE: Startup School for Seniors is specifically aimed at people who have ideas (or too many ideas) and trying to help them sift through all of those to try to find the one that actually looks the most feasible, the most suitable for them, the one that they’re actually going to stick with.
There are obviously the National Career Services, which will help you explore your career options, rebuild your CVs to think about that move. The other thing that we haven’t spoken about that I think is really important to mention is volunteering, because we get a lot of people who decide to make that move as a result of volunteering.
PHILIPPA: While you’re still working, but ideally -
SUZANNE: Absolutely.
PHILIPPA: - presumably, on the side?
SUZANNE: Yeah, definitely.
PHILIPPA: How easy is it, though, to segue a volunteer job into a job?
SUZANNE: Well, I think it’s one of the ways that we certainly see that people have rebuilt their confidence. The win there is about confidence building and feeling capable about making that career shift. Because often the lack of confidence is what’s preventing people from actually shifting careers.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. Is that what you find, too?
HANNAH: Absolutely. It’s a taster of it, isn’t it? I think, and also just exposing yourself to different jobs that you maybe hadn’t even thought about. To speak to people, ask people what they do. Even watching TV programmes and seeing what kind of jobs people have.
One of the things that if someone is really stuck, I often get people to do is think back to when you’re a child. Before we do things because we should do them. Think about when you played, what games you played. Were you creative? Were you outdoors? There’s often lots of clues in the patterns of things you were naturally drawn to and then go and look.
I’ve done workshops with people where a woman really hated her job. She worked in a basement for a micromanaging boss. When she did this exercise, she said, “oh, I can’t see any patterns”. I looked at it and it was all climbing trees, building dens. It was all outside and it was all free. She was in a job that was the opposite.
PHILIPPA: Polar opposite of that.
Are your passions a good guide?
HANNAH: Exactly. It’s tapping into your innate passions because I think we often lose touch with actually who we are and the things that we love to do. And the idea that we have a right to be doing things that we really enjoy, because I think ultimately that’s what we should be doing.
BAT: The point about what someone actually wants to do being completely not obvious to that person. When I was, I needed to get out of journalism, my first thought was academia.
PHILIPPA: Was it?
BAT: I did a Masters, a part-time Masters course, and that was enough to remind myself about why I left.
PHILIPPA: Why didn’t you become an academic?
BAT: Why I was running away from academia in the first place. It was like, it took me a little while of chasing actually quite inappropriate self-diligence before realising.
PHILIPPA: Did it? How much did you spend doing that?
BAT: It was a part-time Masters. I was working at the time. It was over a period of two years.
PHILIPPA: But it sounds like it was quite a useful process.
BAT: It was, yes. I quite enjoyed writing my dissertation and stuff like that. I mean, it was fun. But it was like, “I’m not going to make my money this way”.
HANNAH: I think that’s an important point, because it’s as important to eliminate things that are wrong as it is to find the things that are right. I think volunteering is a really great way to do that. You might think, “I’d love to work with animals”. Then you go and volunteer one day a week in an animal shelter and realise, “oh my god, I’m terrified of animals. I hate it. It’s all dirty”.
PHILIPPA: What you don’t want as well, because we all write wish lists of what we’d like. But I think in some ways, is it quite useful to write a wish list of stuff you definitely don’t want to do? Which might be you don’t want to manage people, or you don’t want to work outside, or you don’t want to have a long commute.
SUZANNE: Or work in an office.
BAT: Use Microsoft Word.
PHILIPPA: Other software is available.
SUZANNE: I was reminded of your conversation that years ago I said, “I want to run a small boutique hotel in Mexico, where I swan around in a kaftan and just ask people what they want to eat every day. While I instruct the Michelin starred chef what to -
PHILIPPA: To make?
SUZANNE: - to do”. Then I started doing Airbnb.
PHILIPPA: Ah ha! And how was that?
SUZANNE: Then I realised that I’ll never run a boutique hotel in Mexico.
PHILIPPA: Or anywhere else?
SUZANNE: Or anywhere else for this.
HANNAH: That maybe saved you an expensive lesson.
SUZANNE: A very expensive lesson.
BAT: I’m impressed at the level of detail in the original fantasy.
HANNAH: Clearly well thought out.
BAT: You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?
SUZANNE: I’ve been thinking about it for a really long time.
Tips for how to switch careers
PHILIPPA: Just recapping here. I’d say first things first: budget. Would we agree?
SUZANNE: Yes, definitely.
PHILIPPA: Budget. Realistic budget about what you’ve got, what you need, what you’re likely to earn in future. Then what gave me this idea of what you want, what you don’t want?
SUZANNE: Take those steps to find out, because often, like my Mexican adventure, it’s an idea swirling around in my head. You have to start at least taking some steps to think, “am I actually going to like this?”. Don’t let it sit around in your head for too long. Actually do something about it.
HANNAH: Maybe even do things like go online and research, look on Glassdoor, what do you people say about the jobs? Or even go on a forum and ask people, let’s say you want to be a physiotherapist, “what’s great about being a physiotherapist and what’s terrible about it?”.
PHILIPPA: Now, I like that idea because that’s real people doing the job telling the truth. Absolutely. Bat, what else?
BAT: I mean, the point made earlier about whatever step you take, do it already. Every single thing that I ever did to shift careers was the correct thing to do, except I should’ve done it beforehand -
PHILIPPA: Really?
BAT: - and stopped sitting around twiddling my thumbs and dithering about it. It was the confidence to get it rolling. Once you start to move the boulder, it takes up momentum and it takes off. Looking back, that was that. If there’s one piece of advice I’d give, it’s like, move fast.
HANNAH: Don’t be afraid. Because we’re so afraid of making mistakes. “What if I do it and it doesn’t work out?”.
But the Susan Jeffers’ book, ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’, has this great thing where she says, “we think it’s like two choices: right and wrong. But actually, it’s get what I expect and then go somewhere new and find out new things”. So even if the thing that you try isn’t the thing ultimately you love, you’ll have learned a lot, met different people, and acquired new skills along that way.
PHILIPPA: And a new perspective, ideas that you didn’t have before. I’m going to close this by just asking about support systems along the way. Because it’s all very well, we start off with this, “I’m going to do it, jack in the job or retrain or whatever”.
But I’m thinking, I mean, this can be a long process, as we’ve said, particularly starting with retraining or volunteering or finding your way through this big, bold step. You’re going to people around you, aren’t you? A little SWAT team to help you along the way, because I’m guessing it’s quite easy to lose heart with it, actually, when things don’t necessarily work out as soon as you might hope.
HANNAH: You do, but there’s also that thing that sometimes when we’re at rock bottom, that we make the bravest choices. Absolutely, I think always having a team around you is important. But if anyone’s listening who doesn’t and thinking, “therefore, I don’t have that to do it”. Like I say, sometimes when you’ve got nothing else to lose, you can make bolder things. And you have to take that risk and that can work out as well. In an ideal world, yes, absolutely. But if you don’t, it’s still OK.
PHILIPPA: I’m thinking, if this sounds tempting, people listen to this and they’re thinking, “yeah, I like this idea”. How can they be sure it’s not just a bad week wobble, or midlife wobble, and it actually is something that they should do?
BAT: It’s when you have that idea over and over and over and over again.
PHILIPPA: OK. Any other thoughts?
HANNAH: I think, yeah, exactly that. If you literally, you’re generally OK and you have one bad week, then that’s just one bad week. But as Bat said, if it’s every day and you hate it. And even if your friend starts saying, “oh my god, you’re not going to talk about your job again, are you?”. Often, people around us notice before we do.
ALL: Yeah.
HANNAH: That thing, if you throw a frog in boiling water, it jumps out. But if you heat it up slowly, it won’t. Sometimes maybe we don’t realise. But I think if your friends and family are like, “oh my god, you hate your job” - then maybe that’s a clue.
PHILIPPA: That’s great. Thank you so much, everyone. I’ve really enjoyed it.
SUZANNE: Thank you.
HANNAH: Thank you.
BAT: Thank you.
PHILIPPA: If you’re enjoying the series, please do give us a rating and a review. If you’re watching on YouTube, why not leave us a comment about your own career switch story or aspiration? We’d love to hear it.
If you missed an episode, no problem. You can catch up anytime on your favourite podcast app, YouTube, or of course, the PensionBee app for PensionBee customers.
Next month, we’ll be answering a big question: how can you turn market volatility into an opportunity? Investing can feel like a roller coaster right now, so we’ll be explaining how you can navigate ups and downs without making rash decisions. It’s going to be a fascinating discussion. Don’t miss it.
Just a final reminder, anything discussed on the podcast shouldn’t be regarded as financial advice or legal advice. When investing, your capital is at risk. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next time.
Risk warning
As always with investments, your capital is at risk. The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. This information should not be regarded as financial advice.
