Reality has a bad habit of disrupting your plans Remember when you were growing up when your parents and other adults kept telling you what life would be like?
Go to school. Get a good education. Get a job. Work hard. Be smart… and everything will work out just fine. You’ll get a job with a good company; enjoy nice benefits and regular pay increases. Then when you’ve reached the top of your profession, you can begin to relax during your last few years of work. Then retire and enjoy your golden years.
Not exactly the way it’s turned out, is it?
For some, it’s likely that did turn out that way. For others, you went to school; got a good education; got a job; worked hard… but then somewhere along the way things changed. And not for the better.
Many of the adults you knew growing up worked for a single employer for most of their adult lives – 30 years, maybe more. But not you. If you’re typical, you’ve had at least 4-6 jobs in probably more than one industry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Now that you’ve moved past age 50, relaxing as you near retirement age is not exactly on your agenda. If you’re not out of work, you have been recently and finding a job at our age – not a snap. The 600-pound gorilla in the room is the ageism that many of us have faced (and are facing) as we try to navigate this new world of workforce intrigue.
Electronic resumes. Non-human resume scanners. Long distance and live video, internet-based job interviews. Trying to solve the job search puzzle that is LinkedIn. All the while trying to deal with age discrimination. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
It might not have supposed to have been this way, but guess what: it is. This is the world in which we live. This is the world where we have to work. This is the world where we’re supposed to find work. And yes, this is not the way it was supposed to be.
But we’re not the first generation to have to deal with adversity. For example, our parent’s generation had their own hardships. Global economic depression and world war to name just two. How many of our parent’s generation postponed starting families and living their lives because of those two catastrophic events?
Those wise old sages who counseled us when we were growing up were right about a lot of things, but not everything. If you think back, you’ll recall that they never said it would be easy… and it’s not. And anyone who expected it to be easy was only fooling themselves.