Workbook
Second Act: the 90-day venture workbook
From 'I've got an idea' to first paying customer in 90 days. Templates for the offer, the first ten conversations and the money.
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Second careers, job hunting, freelancing and side businesses.
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Work on your terms: the complete guide to second careers, side incomes and going it alone
A start-here guide to working later in your career in the UK and US: staying or pivoting in employment, part-time, consulting, a small business, portfolio and seasonal work. It covers age discrimination law and how pensions and Social Security interact with earnings, and ends with a way to choose.
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Whole shop →Guides
Turning thirty years of experience into consulting or freelance work
How to turn a long career into paid consulting or freelance work: packaging your expertise into a specific offer, the principles of pricing, finding your first three clients through your existing network, and the basics of contracts, invoicing and platforms.
Job hunting with experience: CVs, age discrimination law and where the age-friendly employers are
Practical CV and résumé advice from the National Careers Service and AARP, a plain summary of the Equality Act 2010 and the US Age Discrimination in Employment Act with the time limits for complaints, and how to find employers signed up to the Age-friendly Employer Pledge and the AARP Employer Pledge.
Returning to work after a career break
How to return to work after a career break: what returner programmes and returnships are, how to update a CV (résumé in the US), how to handle the gap honestly, interview practice, and the free upskilling routes in the UK (Skills Bootcamps, Multiply, Free Courses for Jobs) and the US (community colleges, AARP Foundation's BACK TO WORK 50+).
Starting a business with experience behind you: what's different, and what's in your favour
What is genuinely different about starting a business in your fifties or sixties, why most of the differences work in your favour, how to test an idea cheaply, the registration basics in the UK and US, and what to do in the first 90 days.
Stories
The BBC producer who put a train driver's words on the news, then went to train driver school
How a BBC radio producer from Accrington became a trainee train driver with Northern: the application, the 20 weeks in the classroom and the 230 hours in the cab. What it takes to drive trains in Britain and the US, and how to test a career change of your own.
'I wasn't coming up for air': Barbara O'Donnell left IT management to lead walkers into the Comeraghs
Barbara O'Donnell of Castlemartyr, County Cork, left a job as an engineering manager in IT, trained as a mountain leader and qualified in the month she turned 50. What the qualification asks for in Ireland and the UK, the volunteer route in the US, and how to start logging hill days of your own.
Natalie Brock's quarter-acre flower farm now pays the family's bills
Natalie Brock, a former teacher and school wellbeing leader in the South Australian Riverland, turned a quarter-acre of neglected land into the Coco and Honey flower farm at 51. What began as a sideline became the family's main income after frost hit the region's vineyards.