One in six people has switched career three times, and more than half of those had to retrain, according to Lifelong Learning, an organisation dedicated to improving skills in the education sector.

Longer lives and careers plus the virtual disappearance of early retirement, generous pensions and the job for life are cited as reasons by those who see career change as a growing phenomenon. When you see your working life extending before you, it makes no sense to be miserable in what you do.

Steve Newman, 45, is a typical career changer. When he left university in the mid1980s, he started in PR and went on to run his own PR company. Ten years later, driven by a desire to raise two children in a good environment, he bought an organic farm even though he had no knowledge of agriculture.

Then four years ago, when he realised that organic farming left him too little time for his family, he resurrected his original environmental-science degree and returned to university for a year to do an MSc in environmental assessment and management. For the past three years he has worked for consulting and business-services group Mouchel as an environmental consultant.

“It was a big decision,” said Newman. “But it wasn’t tough. It was the right thing to do. Farming is physically but not mentally demanding, so to study again was just fantastic and I find my new career rewarding.”

He did admit that family and financial responsibilities made a midlife career change a serious business. Why else would so many fantasise about it but baulk at the reality of doing it.

In addition to an almost inevitable drop in income, there are worries – despite age legislation – about the attractiveness of a newly qualified forty-something graduate to firms more used to taking on twenty-somethings. And there are real psychological challenges in being the oldest student in class or the oldest trainee in the office, dealing with a boss a decade or two younger. It can be tricky to work with a whippersnapper rich in the technical knowledge you lack but devoid of your wider business knowledge and life experience.

Midlife career changers can create envy among peers, but they can also unsettle people who feel they turn the “natural” order on its head. Few firms tailor their training to suit the older, experienced candidate.

Newman was lucky. When he was recruited to Mouchel’s graduate-trainee programme he found that while the skills it covered were a revelation to twenty-somethings, they weren’t to him. “Mouchel was okay with that,” he said. A more tailor-made training experience followed.

Mouchel is unusually open to the career changer. But as much-mooted demographic changes begin to bite, will more companies become more open to taking them on and training them – even actively targeting them for recruitment?

Donna Murphy, managing director of global recruiter Adecco’s research institute, thinks so. She forecasts that most companies will not change attitudes and practices until they experience a shortage of younger workers, but that eventually midlife career changers will be specifically targeted by recruiters.

“In his latest book, Charles Handy claims that 72% of British employees are unhappy with their work and 19% are so unhappy they would actively sabotage their workplace,” she said. “There is a lot of of unhappiness at work. There was a time when this didn’t matter to employers: they wanted to push people out to make room for new recruits but now those new recruits as drying up.”

Murphy said a desire for variety – key drivers in career change – was strong among midlife and older workers, so employers would have to recognise this as the battle to retain and recruit them intensified.

“We have looked at people over 50 returning to work after career breaks and they are choosing to do something different,” she said.

“Some companies are now focused on trying to keep older, experienced staff but there’s also a greater willingness to recruit older workers. Firms that want to win at this should stop trying to recruit people who have already done the job they are recruiting for and focus on skills and aptitudes.”

This isn’t that different from the attitude companies have generally had to younger workers. The young were not expected to know how to do the job but to show potential. Training would be provided.

So why has training traditionally been focused on younger workers? “Firms tend to think that older workers are a bigger risk because they cost more and so there is more at stake if it goes wrong,” said Murphy. “But you can argue there is less risk with older workers because they have a work history to go on.”

There’s another business practice that disadvantages older workers looking for career change. Adecco research reveals that while 96% of UK firms offer workplace training – the highest level in Europe – less than half of that training focuses on training someone to do a new job. Most training is about getting people to do the job they are already doing better.

Newman’s career change may have been easier because his new skills are in short supply. Further education is one of the few sectors that is targeting career changers because it has a dearth of skills.

Lifelong Learning, which serves further education, recently recruited 600 people from the engineering and health and social-care sectors to become teachers and tutors in further education. It is now looking for senior managers already successful in other fields to manage further-education institutions.

“There seems to be more willingness now to change career,” said Alan Clarke, Lifelong Learning manager. “We had 4,000 applications for the 600 posts.”

Clarke added that Lifelong Learning saw huge value in people who have had a career elsewhere and come laden with rich life experience.

“The traditional stereotype of the older worker as out of touch is just so wrong,” he said.

And feeling that his existing business and life experience was a plus not a minus was certainly important to Steve Newman. He feels that Mouchel looked past the fact that he wasn’t the usual graduate recruit. “The people at Mouchel spotted my potential and capitalised on it,” he said.

And indeed they have. Newman already runs the office that he joined only three years ago as a recruit.

FIND OUT MORE

The Sunday Times Recruiter Forum is a platform for employers and industry experts to communicate with job candidates. They can share best practice and discuss the issues affecting recruitment and retention. To find out how your organisation can be involved, contact Brendan Jones at brendan.jones@newsint.co.uk

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