732: 5 Myths About Career Change After 50 That Are Costing You Years

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Scott Ingham spent 18 years in pharmaceutical sales when he started considering a change in his early 50s.

[00:00:06] Scott Ingham: I've been doing the same job for about 18, 19 years, and I'm getting towards an age where people don't normally switch jobs unless they're forced out the door.

[00:00:17] Scott Anthony Barlow: When he told people he was leaving anyway, the response was almost uniform.

[00:00:22] Scott Ingham: "You're crazy." Most of the responses I got were people were making excuses for why they were staying in the role they were staying. Which indicated to me that they were unhappy with what they're doing, but unwilling to make that change.

[00:00:38] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's the thing about pushback that people get when making a career change after 50 years old. It's not useful advice; it's projection. The people around us often become the loudest voices against making changes, not because they're trying to hurt us, in fact, very much the opposite. They care, but they're operating from their own fears, and they can't see outside them.

[00:00:59] Scott's story is one we hear all the time, and it sits right on top of five major beliefs that keep professionals over 50 stuck in roles that they've outgrown. If you're not already wondering what the beliefs are that keep people stuck, then we're gonna break them down, I promise you, and you'll find that each one is a myth.

[00:01:18] But I wanna give you a number first. That number is 42. What does that number represent? Turns out, it's the average age of a new hire this year, according to Revelio Labs. Also, this is the important part; it's the oldest average age ever recorded. Let that sink in for just a second here. The average new hire, not the outlier, is 42 years old.

[00:01:42] The hiring market as a whole is now selecting for experience over age in a way that it never has before. The market is gearing older, the market is shifting for experience, and that's the context for everything we're about to go through. Keep that in mind, especially as we start with the belief that stops most people before they ever even begin.

[00:02:02] Myth number one. The market won't hire someone my age into a new field. Okay, you met Scott earlier, and his experience points directly at the fear underneath most of the other fears. And this sounds like, 'even if I wanted to make a move, the market would never take me seriously as a career changer at this age.'

[00:02:19] But here's what's actually happening in hiring right now, one of the reasons the average age is starting to skew up. 85% of employers now are using skills-based hiring. Okay, now, it's slightly different depending on which report that you look, but generally, with all the reports, you'll find that it's skewing up.

[00:02:40] Alongside that number, 53% of employers have dropped degree requirements entirely. What that means in practice? Employers are no longer hiring a resume; they're hiring a capability set. They're looking at what someone can do, not the pathway they took to get there. Scott competed for a role against other candidates with significantly more experience in that specific area, and yet he was the one who was hired.

[00:03:05] He didn't get the role because he had the most specific experience in that particular area. He got it because he knew exactly what he wanted and was able to articulate that. Two different things.

[00:03:15] Scott Ingham: I was just like, "This is what I'm looking for in a position, in a company, in a company culture." And I honestly think that was what sealed it for me.

[00:03:24] Scott Anthony Barlow: So if you've accumulated quite a bit of experience along the way, then this means that the market isn't actually moving away from hiring people like you. It's restructuring itself in a direction that benefits you. Truly phenomenal news.

[00:03:38] Myth number two. Changing careers at 50 means starting from the bottom. Now, if your first thoughts around career change are along the lines of, "Hey, I can't go back to entry-level. I can't start over. I have a mortgage. I have responsibilities. I have kids in college. Starting over means starting from zero, and that's just not realistic, so therefore, I'm out." That's not what we're talking about here.

[00:04:00] Turns out, that's not what you have to do at all. Carolyn was a mechanical engineer. She had 35 years experience in the field and had moved into leadership roles. And by the time she was considering a change, she was sort of burned out and got to the point where she's like, "I need to walk away from engineering entirely."

[00:04:19] Carolyn: I was doubting everything about myself. I failed in that role. I believed that was going to be a great opportunity for me, and I failed. And so what am I doing? There's definitely something wrong here. I really did believe that it was me, that it wasn't the wrong fit or anything like that. I thought it was just me not being capable of doing this job.

[00:04:43] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's a common place after a difficult stretch in a role that wasn't a fit, and it leads people to believe they have to throw out everything and start over. That's almost never the case. What Carolyn discovered when we helped her move back through her career history and assess every job, every role, what was creating more fulfillment for her, what energized her, what hadn't, well, it turns out it was something different entirely.

[00:05:11] Carolyn: I was not in the wrong field after all. Engineering actually does. There were times in my career that I absolutely loved what I was doing, and I was energized by the type of work it was, and it was satisfying.

[00:05:25] Scott Anthony Barlow: The problem wasn't engineering. It was one specific thing that she had been pulled into and one specific area that she'd been pulled away from.

[00:05:35] Carolyn: I like to mentor people, not the same as managing people.

[00:05:38] Scott Anthony Barlow: This is a subtle distinction. Being in a leadership role versus mentoring people, still being in engineering versus getting out of engineering entirely, there's a whole lot of latitude in between that most people never explore. It's also the one distinction that changed everything for Carolyn.

[00:05:55] And once she identified that, the answer wasn't a new field. It was a different configuration of the exact same field, but one built around her signature strengths rather than the responsibilities that had been draining her. So you can already guess where this is going. She didn't start from the bottom.

[00:06:11] She made a lateral move, but onto a small team with very collaborative leadership, hands-on technical work, and a four-day workweek. And here's how she feels about that now.

[00:06:22] Carolyn: I absolutely love the team I'm working on.

[00:06:24] Scott Anthony Barlow: The starting from zero framing assumes that your value is not going to carry over in the new situation. However, we find that it does over and over and over again. In fact, more so now than ever before. What actually determines your level of value in a new field is how well you can identify, articulate, and demonstrate the skills and experiences that cross over. Now, that's a translation problem, not a starting over problem, and it's a solvable one.

[00:06:55] Myth number three. A new degree or certification is required before making a move. This myth delays more career changes than almost anything else, and mostly because it feels productive. Getting educated, or training, or going back to school feels like it's the proper thing to do. It feels like what you should be doing. It feels like taking action. It feels like preparation. It feels like doing the responsible thing before making a big move, and sometimes it is the right move.

[00:07:25] There are fields where a credential is a genuine requirement. You know, things in healthcare. You wanna be a doctor? For sure, yeah. You wanna be an attorney? Absolutely. Certain engineering disciplines. But if the job has a licensure requirement, that's not a myth; that's a prerequisite. However, the majority of any types of changes don't require that.

[00:07:49] The credential is not the missing variable. Most of the time, you can get the credential afterwards if you need it at all. Here's what the data shows. Employers right now are not paying a premium for degrees that they could verify on paper five years ago. They're paying for demonstrated capability now.

[00:08:06] Fortune's recent reporting on employer priorities in a more selective market found something specific. Companies are prioritizing institutional knowledge, the kind that can only come from years of applied experience, and they're looking for that over academic credentials. They want people who have actually done the work in complex environments.

[00:08:26] So the question here is not, "What credential do I need?" It's, "What can I demonstrate right now and to whom?"

[00:08:32] Myth number four. The financial risk is too high at 50. Okay, so this is a real consideration, but it gets framed in a way that makes only one side of the equation visible. Usually, it sounds like, "Hey, I can't afford to take a pay cut," or, "I have 15 years until retirement, and I can't afford to start over." It sounds like that.

[00:08:52] What that framing leaves out is the cost of staying. Now, the fact that we're putting more emphasis on what we might lose, well, that's what psychologists call loss aversion, the tendency to weigh potential losses far more heavily than equivalent gains. When a 50-year-old is deciding whether to make a career change or not, loss aversion puts every short-term transition cost under a spotlight, while the long-term cost of staying in a poor fit role, it stays largely invisible, and that's not a financial calculation. That is a cognitive one.

[00:09:24] If you're over 50, and you have, you know, less than 15 years until a traditional retirement age, then those 15 years are not a narrow window. They're actually significant runway. And the question isn't, "Is there enough time to change?" The question is, "What do those 15 years look like if I don't make a change?"

[00:09:42] There's a compound effect that happens when someone stays in a role that no longer fits, and it's what we often will call being comfortably unhappy. But it's not just dissatisfaction. That's actually not the real problem. It's the gradual erosion of engagement, which impacts your performance, it impacts advancement, it impacts earning potential over the remaining arc of your career, and most people don't realize that because they're like, "Well, I could just keep doing this."

[00:10:10] The financial logic, however, for staying in work that doesn't fit for the sake of security often doesn't hold up when you actually run the math with the psychological considerations. That start to bring your earning potential down, not up, especially compared to the cost of a well-planned transition. Bob Kalish spent 24 years leading restaurants, and when he first came to us, he was pretty honest with where his head was at.

[00:10:35] Bob Kalish: When I first came on and signed on, I wanted to just get that last patch of my career to retirement. If I had to drag it across the line on my back, that's what I was gonna do.

[00:10:45] Scott Anthony Barlow: That is comfortably unhappy, where you're sort of getting settled with the staying is just what you're going to do now, and it's exactly the kind of thinking that loss aversion produces, without you even realizing that that's what's causing it.

[00:10:58] All the cost is on the side of making a move, and none of it is on the side of staying, while we're ignoring the costs of staying. As he worked with our team, we started to ask him a different question. What if you were doing the things that you love to do with the people that you love doing it with? Why would you even want to retire in the first place?

[00:11:17] Now, probably not surprisingly, Bob said that question changed everything, because it forced him to put the cost of staying in the same frame as the cost of moving. But that's what makes this a myth. We have to consider both sides. Both are real financial considerations. But the myth part only treats one side of them as the risk.

[00:11:35] Let's cover myth number five. The window or the time period or whatever you wanna call it has already closed. It's past time. It's too far along for me. Now, this mindset behind this belief has nothing to do with the market or credentials or even money. It's a belief around time, and it tends to operate in the background, and sort of creeps up on you. And it sounds like, "Oh, I should've done this 10 years ago. I waited too long. That opportunity has passed."

[00:11:59] Bob Kalish: As I'm reaching into my 50s now, what did I wanna do, right, with the last 10 years? What do I wanna do next? What's gonna fulfill me? And it just kind of keeps building momentum.

[00:12:11] Scott Anthony Barlow: Bob isn't someone who missed his window. He intentionally asked questions to identify what he wants work to look like, and then made a decision that his remaining time was worth putting action towards. Here's what the research consistently shows. Career changers report high levels of satisfaction in their new fields, with roughly 80% describing the change positively when they surveyed.

[00:12:32] The regrets that show up most frequently in that same research, well, turns out they're not about changing. They're actually about waiting too long. The window doesn't close at 50, doesn't even close at 40, doesn't close at 60. What changes at 50 is the clarity of how much finding work that fits actually matters.

[00:12:51] It matters much more at that point. And here's the other thing about that idea of the window. The average new hire in 2025 was 42. We mentioned this earlier, right? And employers are not closing doors on experienced professionals. In many cases, they're looking for judgment that only comes from years of applied experience.

[00:13:10] The market timing right now is actually better than it's been in pretty much a generation for professionals making this kind of move. The window isn't closed. In a lot of ways, it's open wider than it's ever been before. Okay, so here's the one thing about all of these myths, these beliefs put together.

[00:13:24] They don't actually show up that one at a time. They compound together. You hear that the market won't hire someone your age in a new field, and you hear a story about that, so you figure you have to start at the bottom, or starting at the bottom feels financially impossible, so you tell yourself you need new credentials first.

[00:13:42] And then we start to move into, well, getting new credentials takes time. I don't wanna go back to school in the first place, you know, and that just reinforces that feeling that the window is already closing. Underneath all of it is the conviction that the risk is too high to justify any of it, and then that's how people stay stuck, not just for changing careers, not just making other types of moves, but pretty much everything.

[00:14:06] This is the way it happens all through every area of life. Not because they're not capable, but because these types of beliefs, in particular, these five beliefs, are holding each other up. Look, if you want help with this, we're happy to help support you in one way or another, and we can probably figure out the right type of help.

[00:14:24] We work with professionals at exactly this stage all the time, every single day. This is literally what we do. People who know that they need to make a move but haven't done so because of the types of beliefs, the types of misinformation that we just went through. And if that's you, send me an email, Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and then we'll connect you with a member of our team and help you take the next step.

[00:14:48] We'll have a conversation together, and we'll figure out the very best way that we can support you. By the way, if this episode was helpful, then share it. Forward it to somebody who is over 50, who has been waiting, and sometimes the most useful thing that you can do for someone is hand them the stories and the data that dismantles the beliefs that has been keeping them where they are. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. This is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I am out.