employment

Screenshot 2019-03-04 20.03.53

Over 50 and Looking for a Job: The Complete Getting Started Guide

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We’ve updated our Job Guide for 50+ job hunters

Assembled from our series of articles by David Perlman, an executive recruiter and career coach, on looking for a job after 50. Now available as a single downloadable PDF document to kickstart your next career search.

To download the full guide click here.

To read and share the stories one at a time, follow the links below.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Networking

Part 3: Online Job Boards

Part 4: The Interview

Part 5: Recruiters

Part 6: Negotiating an Offer

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Dave Perlman has reinvented himself many times.  He’s been a software developer, a motel desk clerk, a historian, a forklift driver, a CTO and a few other things.

Currently he runs his own high-performing executive recruiting firm from his home outside Boston. He handles career coaching and resume polishing as adjuncts to that business.

 

 

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Relatively Painless Networking

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Some say more than 70% of people land jobs through networking. If you’re an introvert, this statistic is enough to bring on a panic attack. Networking for People Who Hate to Network: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections That Count, by Next for Me advisor Karen Wickre, is coming out later this year and we can’t wait. In the meantime, we found some advice for making the networking process a little less painful, most written by introverts, for introverts.

In CIO, Sharon Florentine identifies the strategies and tools that can make networking a little less painful for introverts.

  • Adjust your expectations. Approaching a meeting with the sole goal of getting a job makes the whole encounter awkward, and can backfire. Instead, focus on the opportunity to find common ground. The person may not be able to help you today, but the connection you make now may make them think of you in the future.
  • Use online platforms to your advantage. Start with LinkedIn to reconnect with former colleagues and make new connections. Broaden your online search to learn more about things you have in common with potential connections to make your connection requests less generic and more authentic. Learn the social media favored by the people in the company or industry you want to work in. Graphic and visual artists can follow and engage with other artists on Instagram, while those in the hospitality industry can learn more about a brand based on their customer interactions on Facebook. Quora and Twitter can help you find subject matter experts in a number of industries.
  • Build your brand from the comfort of your laptop. It’s never been easier to establish your personal brand by creating your own website or online portfolio. Tools like Squarespace and Medium have built-in social sharing that can help you highlight your professional achievements and let friends and colleagues know you’re in the market for a job or consulting opportunity.  “The Web offers a much less stressful networking opportunity than in-person career fairs or live networking events,” says Rona Borre, CEO of IT staffing firm Instant Alliance.

 

Read the full article: 9 networking tips for introverts

On The Muse, self-described introvert Anna Runyan offers tips for powering through for those of us who are less than thrilled at the thought of schmoozing with a room full of strangers. Among them:

  • Be prepared with ice breaker questions to kick off conversations. Indeed.com has a list of 17 icebreaker questions that range from fun (“If you could have any super power, what would it be?”) to thought-provoking (“What’s something you believed earlier in your career but think about differently now?”).
  • Use the buddy system by bringing a colleague or friend to a networking event. If that’s not possible, she advises screwing up your courage and making a conscious effort to connect and put someone else at ease. That gives you someone to take breaks with and an excuse to talk to others by introducing your new friend.
  • Take a networking challenge. Runyan challenged herself to meet with four people she knew and four she didn’t know every month. “Think about how you can challenge yourself to step out of your comfort zone just a little bit. It might have unexpected—and great—results.”

 

Read the full article: An Introvert’s Guide to Networking

In the Harvard Business Review, Dorie Clark mused about how, like most introverts, she felt drained by loud, crowded events. Rather than avoid important career-building opportunities, she found ways to make the process work for her.

  • Network on your terms. Instead of convening at industry parties that tend to be noisy and overwhelming, she gathers a few like-minded colleagues together for intimate dinners.
  • Know your limits. She tries to be cognizant of when she needs to recharge, alternating between social events and downtime. Knowing your limits helps you make the most of the times when you are feeling “on”.
  • Calculate the return on investment for your effort. She also recommends doing a cost-benefit analysis of any networking event. “Ask yourself who’s likely to attend, and whether they’re your target audience (however you define that — potential clients, interesting colleagues, etc.). Then follow up by asking how likely it is that you’ll actually get to connect with them.” If the odds are low, saving your energy for another day may be your best option.

 

Read the full article: Networking for Introverts

 

Photo credit: Shinichi Sugiyama

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Learning to Code After 60

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I am [enter your age here]. Is that too late to become a developer?

There’s a popular meme going around the developer boot-camp world: “I’m an unborn child. Is that too old to start learning to code?”

Even millennials ask it. Like exposing themselves as a clunky beginner might become an embarrassing fashion statement?

When you turn 30, you have no experience with being 30. Nobody has any experience with the age they become, which means we’re all newbies at life.

So, if you’re not learning, you’re not living.

I’m a sixty-something code-newbie who’s been a product manager and payments expert for several years. I’m here to prove that you’re never too old to start a new challenge like learning to code, or a new career.

Here’s the thing

Learning and striving to become a developer with some age and business-world experience can result in tremendous advantages. Those benefits will serve both you and the company or client that is going to hire you:

1. You have problem-solving creds. Logic comes easier after earning some merit badges in the scout-troop of Life.

2. You better know the rewards of patience, persistence and practice.

3. You have emotional intelligence. That means you can be a high-performing contributor to a team and get along with everybody.

4. You are more equipped to understand customer experience and see the reasons why.

5. You contribute to diversity.

How Older Developers Help Diversity

Ageism is one of those biases that most people are not even aware of. Even older folks can be proponents of codger-bias if they refer to themselves as grumpy, stubborn, or obstinate.

Big news! You’ve got no time for any of that nonsense when scoping an algorithm.

Like the best sports coaches you had in school, older life-seasoned team-mates add the sauce of wisdom to youthful meat. Besides the benefits listed above, they can enhance team collaboration, performance, and mutual trust.

The tech world needs tons more gender-equality AND diversity, and that means more women, more black and brown skin, more homo-lesbian-trans, and definitely more older folks.

I’m helping to fill two of those buckets — the gays and the grays.

My Path to Front End Developer

My career as a product manager was not demanding enough creative input. I was not getting the opportunities to put my constant self-learning and self-acquired business knowledge to full use.

One day, I got turned down for a new role because I lacked web and mobile experience. And that was when I decided to switch my focus to learning some really hard stuff.

The first online course was One Month Rails and I got my first exposure to Bash, Sublime Text, and GitHub. Then in one of their HTML courses, I coded my first static page and put it up on the web.

Later, I taught myself how to wire-frame a mobile app and took a course from Udemy to try and build it in Swift code (not easy).

At that point about a year ago, I pivoted to Free Code Camp and haven’t stopped growing. I believe it’s the best free online training for web development, because it teaches you how easy it is to swallow lessons and how hard it is to cough up real projects and algorithms.

Six months later, I paused my Free Code Camp assignments to help two startups with design ideas (for free).

From that, I expanded my FCC portfolio-page project to a live site.

I put in screenshots of my design concepts, simple web sites, and a company video.

I learned how to add Google Analytics, meta tags, the Facebook share button, and a whole lot more.

Last month, something interesting happened to speed things up: I got my first paid freelance-developer gig from a friend who owns a small local business. You’ll be able to see it later in my portfolio.

I also found a great community called CodeNewbies and attended their amazing Codeland conference in New York City. More about that to come.

So what have I learned from learning to code?

Besides renewed clarity of purpose and creative excitement, here are five practical observations that have sunk in for me:

1. Free (and almost free) resources are endless. I determined not to consider a paid boot camp until I had exhausted everything free on the Internet. Yet, the more I know, the farther this free supply appears to stretch.

2. The coder ecosphere is a giving community, and I’m drawn to a culture like that. It rewards and commends smart people who give away knowledge for the good of all. And we must thank Google and others like them. The Big G might be the largest money machine in history, but it provides the world a lot of free knowledge.

3. Making stuff is the real learning. The hard part is the valuable part. The goal is learning enough to create the evidence that you can — and will — get paid to make good stuff every day. So, do that now.

4. Learning to code improves sensory and short-term memory. Before this, I couldn’t recall a phone number past five-seconds. No more. It feels like my eye-to-brain coordination has gotten more “imprintable”. Staring at JQuery functions and color-picking hex codes may do that for you.

Note: Millennials may not get this concept. Being the first babies born after the invention of video games, many grew up with a natural eye-hand cognitive congruity. When Mark Zuckerberg stated that “Young people are just smarter,” this might be what he meant.

And my final point:

5. Learning to code makes you smarter and younger. This has been my experience over the past year with Free Code Camp, Hack Reactor prep, and completing projects. Yeah, some paperwork says I’m older than everybody in the room, but who cares. I have value to give the world and nothing to lose.

So listen-up, kids (and everybody else). Forget about “too old” to learn to code, because it’s never too late. Clunky beginners are cool!

 This article was originally published on Medium.
Chuck Phipps is helping design & build delightful web stuff. Find him here.
Gracefully Radio

What’s Next For You? Jeff Tidwell’s Asking That Question For Us All

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Next For Me Founder, Jeff Tidwell

We recently covered Gracefully Radio, conceived of by longtime public radio commentator and author Lisa Napoli. Gracefully aims to show, through the stories we share, that while aging is inevitable, how we deal with it is a choice.

Lisa interviewed Next For Me founder Jeff Tidwell last month and this week published the interview and story.

Below are excerpts from the conversation.

On being an older worker in tech:

JT: I started noticing very subtle things or situations where I was dismissed when in other years I was at the center of the conversations. My place in the world had changed. Just not being heard in professional situations.

I think one of the threads through this is that we don’t admit it or feel it. I was always the young guy in a crowd of younger people.

I thought I was vital and au courant and knew the latest music and could communicate with people decades younger than me. Then it hit all of a sudden – My place in the world was not a strong as it used to be.

LP: As a person with a history of political activism how are you approaching this problem?

JT: When there is discrimination it’s not intentional and unconscious much of the time. It’s systematically built into workplace systems. Our companies are not built for people to work longer and save enough for retirement. It needs to change in the workplace.

With Next For Me, we’ve zoomed in on two topics – work and finance. Topics that people inherently don’t want to confront easily. They’re sensitive about it. They’re embarrassed about it. How do you talk about this without it being a bummer? It’s because it can be positive and empowering to say that we can change the workplace to make it more welcoming to us.

Workplaces can become more open to the idea that there’s value in wisdom. Experience can help in collaboration – here’s an easier way to react. There’s value in that.

And for older workers like me, we need to get out of our rut. There’s something learn from younger colleagues – things that have changed while we got stuck in doing things they way we have been doing them. Even our attitudes can often use an upgrade.

Link to full article and podcast: What’s Next For You? Jeff Tidwell’s Asking That Question For Us All

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IBM’s Institutionalized Ageism

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Illustration by Richard Borge

As it scrambled to compete in the internet world, the once-dominant tech company cut tens of thousands of U.S. workers, hitting its most senior employees hardest and flouting rules against age bias.

ProPublica and Mother Jones published a hair raising investigative report on years of institutionalized ageism at ‘Big Blue’ told through the voices of the displaced workers. Many were systematically moved out of their positions, some on the precipice of receiving their pensions, after years of service to the company.

The authors Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin used an innovative technique of surveying readers with the following call to action “Over 50 and looking for a job? We’d like to hear from you.”

They received a flood of responses and started seeing a pattern of respondents who had worked at IBM. They uncovered a Facebook Group formed to discuss the pattern by former employees. They conducted a more in depth survey to this group and filled in the blanks with direct interviews and a pile of incriminating internal documents.

Read the full article: Cutting ‘Old’ Heads At IBM

Read the approach the authors took to gather the information: How the Crowd Led Us to Investigate IBM

Read the survey used in the investigation: Over 50 and Looking for a Job? We Want to Hear From You

Illustration by Richard Borge

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