If you are contemplating career change over 40, you need to make a detailed assessment of your present situation. This will help you decide what you do and don't want in your new career, as well as determining any training you might need.

Your Present Job

You probably know what you don't like about your present job. The following questions will help you see what you do like in your current job or what you liked about previous jobs.

Which jobs have you had and how much experience in each?
Which skills did you learn in those jobs?
Which aspects of each of your jobs did you most enjoy and why?
Which skills do you want to continue using in your new career?

Transferable Skills

Many of the transferable skills you have picked up in other areas of your life will also be useful in the workplace. In order to determine the transferable skills you have developed outside your job, here are a few questions for you to answer:

What experience have you had outside work?

Examples might be bringing up a family, coaching a sports team, volunteering, fundraising, creating websites or databases, or making Christmas gifts and decorations. Look at any hobbies and interests you have had for some time and in which you have become proficient.

Which skills have you used as part of those experiences?

What Do You Want?

Next, you need to think about what you want from your new career, starting with broad concepts and then narrowing them down to specifics. What do you dream about ?

Do you want to work with people, animals, things or facts? Or would you prefer a combination of these? Then get into the details, for example if you want to work with animals, what type of animals and in what capacity? Do you want to be a zookeeper, working with reptiles or do you want to groom dogs?

Where would you ideally like to work?

This can include the general location - city or countryside, indoors or outdoors, home or abroad - and more specific location such as in an office, a hospital, a school or at home?

Are there new skills you would like to learn? What are they?

Can You Afford Retraining?

Many careers will involve an element of retraining, which can mean anything from a short course to a fulltime degree course. So you should also look at how you would finance retraining and also how you would cope with having to study again.

Fitting A Career Change into Your Life

Career change requires a big shake up in your life and so you need to consider how it will fit in with your current lifestyle. If you need to go back to school you will have to think about how this will fit around your current commitment. And you need to talk to other people in your household to see how they feel about it and how it will affect them

You also need to think about the amount of time it will take to get yourself established in a new career. This could cause financial problems and you will need to look at ways in which those can be resolved.

There is a lot to think about when you want a mid life career change, but if you do a detailed assessment of your current situation , this will help you to find solutions to potential problems before they arise.