What if getting over-50s back into employment isn’t the only answer?
There’s been a lot of conversation recently about the difficulty people over 50 face when trying to get back into employment.
And rightly so.
We should be asking why someone with 25 or 30 years of experience can suddenly find themselves struggling to get through a recruitment process. We should be talking about ageism, career gaps and the assumptions made about people in midlife.
But I think there’s another conversation worth having.
What if getting people over 50 back into employment isn’t the only measure of success?
What if we also became much better at helping some of them turn 25 years of experience into businesses?
I went back to education in my 40s after a long career break. When I tried to find my way back into conventional employment, it was extraordinarily difficult.
Eventually, I built a business instead.
And one of the things I understand much better now is just how much professional knowledge a person accumulates by midlife.
Not simply technical expertise.
You know how organisations work. You know how clients behave. You know what tends to go wrong. You’ve seen ideas succeed and fail. You’ve dealt with difficult people, complicated decisions, changing markets and unexpected problems.
Much of that knowledge is so familiar to you that you may not even recognise it as valuable.
Someone else will.
Experience can become intellectual property
One of the biggest shifts when moving from employment into business is learning to stop thinking primarily in terms of job titles and start thinking in terms of problems you know how to solve.
A person might have spent 20 years in HR.
That doesn’t necessarily mean she needs to open an “HR consultancy.”
Perhaps she has an unusually deep understanding of helping companies manage organisational change.
Perhaps she knows how to build leadership teams.
Perhaps she has spent years solving one expensive problem that a particular kind of company repeatedly encounters.
That expertise can become a consultancy, an advisory practice, a methodology, a programme, a training business or eventually something much bigger.
But there is a step between having expertise and having a business.
And I don’t think we talk about that step enough.
Starting a business at 50 is different
Someone starting a business in midlife isn’t necessarily starting from scratch. You may already have decades of expertise, professional credibility, contacts and judgement.
What You often don’t have is a clear way of packaging all of that.
What exactly am I selling?
Who is it for?
Which part of my experience is commercially valuable?
Why would someone choose me?
What should I charge?
How do I explain what I do without reducing 25 years of experience to “I help businesses grow”?
These are business and positioning questions before they are marketing questions.
And they matter because expertise alone doesn’t automatically create a viable business.
It has to be translated into something another person understands, values and is prepared to pay for.
We could get much better at helping people make that transition
There are very good reasons to help experienced people return to employment. Many people want exactly that.
But entrepreneurship should be a credible alternative for those who want it - not a consolation prize when employment doesn’t work out.
Imagine if we became genuinely good at identifying commercially valuable expertise in people approaching the second half of their careers.
Not simply giving them a course on “how to start a business,” but helping them interrogate what they already know.
What have you spent 25 years becoming unusually good at?
Where does that knowledge solve an expensive or important problem?
Who needs it?
How could you package it?
What business could be built around it?
Because at 50 or 55, the question doesn’t have to be: Who will employ me?
For some people, a much more interesting question might be: What could I build with everything I know now?
