From the course: Marci Alboher on Pursuing an Encore Career Instead of Retirement

Experimenting

From the course: Marci Alboher on Pursuing an Encore Career Instead of Retirement

Start my 1-month free trial

Experimenting

“

- Regardless of where you are in this process, there are a couple of techniques you can use that are really good to help you at any stage of this transition. And you'll find that you're kind of doing them over and over again. First is research. Often you can do this without leaving your home 'cause a lot of it is available online these days. You can read up on fields that interest you. You could sign up for relevant newsletters and newsletters from organizations you care about and you want to start following. You can do a lot of research right here on LinkedIn by starting to follow influencers or organizations that you care about. So that's the research phase. And it's ongoing so you never really stop doing that because you should always be learning and keeping up. But at some point you got to get out of your head and into the world. And that's where you have to try stuff out. So you can have informational interviews. You can meet people for coffee dates. You can go to events and you can do kind of mini-emersions. I mean if you get a hunch of something that interests you, you can ask someone if you could visit them where they work or do a mini-shadow experience of some kind. And finally, and I really think this is the most important tool you're going to use in your Encore transition, and you're probably going to do a lot of it, is volunteering. And volunteering is really a triple win. It's good for the world, obviously good for the causes that you care about or the people that you're trying to help. It's good for your health. There's actually data that shows that volunteering is both good for your emotional and your physical health. And it's actually also good for your career. In fact, LinkedIn has some research that shows that employers value volunteer experience as much as they value paid work. So that triple win is why I think volunteering is one of the things that you're really going to need to think about and even if you're doing it now, you may want to refine the ways that you volunteer. So, as you're going out into the world and you're having these, you know, experiments, or you're trying stuff out, get in the habit of developing a feedback loop for yourself. So you could take out that notebook again or open up that document and pretty soon after you've had an experience with an organization or doing something, or even talking to someone, and visiting a new kind of environment where you might want to put yourself. How did you feel? Try to journal a little bit about that and document that and do it pretty close to the time that you've had the experience. It will be incredibly useful to you when you go back and you try to figure out where you want to dig deeper, and where you want to cross something off your list.

Contents