How to Overcome the Challenge of a Midlife Career Pivot

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John Tarnoff: We are still stuck in a world where everyone is touting the resume as the document, the vehicle that gets you the job, and you've got to make sure your resume is all tip top. That is ancient thinking.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I'm your host, David Rice.

My guest today is John Tarnoff. He's an expert in mid-career transitions and the creator of the Mid-Career Lab. We're going to be talking about the challenges facing people who have to change their professional direction in midlife and what advice he has for finding the next door to open. 

So John, welcome! 

John Tarnoff: Great to be here, David. Thanks for having me on. 

David Rice: Excellent. So we're talking about career transitions, and I want to start with yours a bit, actually, because you've come out of the entertainment industry and you get into career coaching. Take me through what that was like and how you sort of find your way. 

John Tarnoff: That's a counterintuitive career path. I do not have the typical background of a career coach. Most of these folks tend to come out of HR and recruiting with good reason. I come out of it from a different set of experiences that are all, I think, relevant because they are about resilience.

So as you say, I come out of the entertainment business, classically a volatile business. And I think at the time that I got into it, it was unusually and uniquely volatile. And people used to look at me and go, why are you changing jobs so much? What's going on in that crazy business of yours?

It's like, well, this is the way it is, right? You're constantly trying to chase the taste of the American public or the international public. And so trends come and trends go. You're trying to figure out what's going on. People come in. They spend a lot of money. They fail. They get changed out. If you're part of that administration, you get changed out.

So, all sorts of stuff is going on like that. What I think is interesting is that the rest of the world, because of the digital revolution has become like entertainment, accelerated, fast paced, changeable, whipsawing back and forth, hiring a lot of people, firing a lot of people. So the lessons that I learned about career resilience seem to make a lot more sense now in this world than they used to.

And I went off to start this career coaching practice because I realized that mid-career professionals, people who were looking at the last part of their career, we're faced with this dilemma of, wait a minute, I'm in my fifties and the people are trying to get me to retire. I have no interest in retiring.

I can't afford to retire. I want to keep working for at least another 10, 20 years. What's going on here? Where are the jobs? Why is there ageism? And here we are. 

David Rice: We're in this place, some businesses in certain sectors, right? And I think this is maybe a long trend that's been around for a long time.

Right. But everybody's youth obsessed. They want fresh blood. They want new ideas, especially in techs. This is the kind of thinking that goes on. And as you enter your forties and you're working in these sectors, you start to feel a bit like you don't matter as much, or companies aren't looking for you anymore.

Talk to me about that, where you find people at this point in their lives and some of the struggles that they're going through. 

John Tarnoff: For me, it starts with this idea of what does experience mean? And why does experience matter? That's a question that younger managers don't quite get, nor should they get it because they don't have it.

So how can you understand the value of experience if you don't have a lot of experience yourself? I understand why people who are older, who think, well, I've been in this business for 20 years. That should count for something. In a very fast moving world where skills are constantly changing, business models are constantly changing, your experience doesn't have the same heft that it used to have when businesses were stable.

So you have to really up your game and yes, you have to use your experience and your experience is very valuable, but you really need to speak about it in a different way. You need to fold it into your value proposition in a much more, I guess updated a way, which is to say that you don't want to dine out on your experience.

You don't want to dine out on your war stories about how you used to do this and where you learned how to do this stuff. All of those lessons are valuable. You need to apply them to solve the problems of right now. So if you're going up on a job and you are fortunate enough to get called into an interview, then you want to be working in that interview in the present.

And you really want to interview the company about what their problems are. Confirm the understanding that you've done through your research about what they're focusing on, what that position is going to be about and really apply all of your background to offering solutions and in essence, coaching them through in that interview, how you would perform and how you would address this opportunity.

David Rice: We spoke before this, you talked a little bit about what broken hiring systems. I guess I want to know, what is it that you think is not working in the usual way of job hunting and pursuing jobs? What's the big lesson that you've learned as you talk with people and how you look at that?

John Tarnoff: So the preface to this answer is that there's a new book by a guy named Gary Burnison, who is the CEO of Korn Ferry. The title of the book is "Lose the Resume, Land the Job". So when the head of the, one of the largest recruiting firms in the world is telling you to lose your resume, I think it's time to pay attention.

And yet we are still stuck in a world where everyone is touting the resume as the document, the vehicle that gets you the job, and you've got to make sure your resume is all tip top. That is ancient thinking. Right. The resume is still valuable as far as I'm concerned as a placeholder document. It's your tracking document.

If you're a hiring manager and you're interviewing five people today, you're going to have those resumes there to remind you of who that person is, and be that cheat sheet on your call. It's not the document that's going to properly represent the entire spectrum of what you offer and what you can do.

That's your LinkedIn profile. So, one of the things that I work with my clients on is the proper optimization of the LinkedIn profile for a modern world where that resume is just one piece of the puzzle. The other aspect of this is that recruiters are overwhelmed. So when you talk about the broken hiring system, this is just a complete cluster blank of confusion around the overwhelm.

And I don't know what the real status is at 250 average applicants per position. Is it 500 average applicants per position? Obviously that's going to change from company to company position to position, but clearly, you have statistically a better chance of getting into Harvard than you do of getting a job by just sending out a, an application online and praying for someone to get back to you.

And they won't, and they definitely won't get back to you if you are over 40 or over 50. Right. Because there is this bias. Most of the people who are doing this grunt work are younger people. And there've been some interesting studies about the confirmation bias that goes into the hiring system. Most hiring managers and recruiters are looking for uncomfortable hiring and considering people who are like them.

So whether it's the same age, the same background, the same ethnicity, whatever those questions are. This is what you're dealing with. So if you are older, you're going to be on the outskirts of what they're comfortable with. So these are some of the aspects. I mean, I think there's more to talk about the broken hiring system, but this is, I mean, let's get into AI.

I mean, for a sec, I mean, AI is further breaking it. Because it's taking the substance of the engagement, the interaction away from real people and farming it out to the AI, right? In terms of composing your resume, submitting your resume, and on the employer side, reviewing the resume, even conducting interviews with AI bots.

I mean, where's the opportunity for the candidate to engage directly with a human being, the human being that they're going to be working with. And I understand the overwhelm and I understand that we need systems to somehow parse this, but at the same time, it's a mess. 

David Rice: We're at a point here where what's getting lost is a lot of the context. I think like it's how it'd be, it's become really hard on your resume to paint the context of your experience in a way that is still digestible. Right. 

John Tarnoff: And in a way that's going to be kicked out by the applicant tracking system or the recruiter who's spending 10, seven seconds on your resume, looking for those keywords.

And by the way, skills are great, but skills are fungible. Skills are changing. If you're hiring people based on skills alone, you're going to be churning them out, in, in the next year, because their skillsets are going to change. If they don't have the character, the growth mindset, the stick to itiveness, persistence, all the character skills that what we used to call soft skills, which I think are really should be called core skills, then you're going to have to change them out because they're not going to be able to cope with the changes that are coming down the pike that you need them to adapt to.

You should have hired someone who may not have had those skills going in, but who was adaptable, learnable, teachable, and who could really build some traction with your organization. 

David Rice: Yeah. And folks who had those soft skills, right? One of the things that, one of the strengths that they have oftentimes is their ability to build big networks and networking is really a big part of sort of being able to transition and find your next thing.

But for folks who maybe aren't natural networkers, we'll say, what are some kind of easy tips that you have for ways for them to build connections and develop relationships that will lead to them finding other opportunities? 

John Tarnoff: First of all, when people say, Oh, I'm terrible at networking. Do I have to do this?

Right? Isn't there some trick to apply to jobs? And I can stay in the background and it's like, no, there is no trick. You have to use your network. You have to build relationships with people. You have to rely on that, that interpersonal contact. Having said that, I understand that a lot of people are introverts.

I happen to be an introvert. I'm never the guy who's going to go, yeah, networking event. Yeah. I can't wait to show up. But at the same time, what I share with people is the idea that if you have a really clear sense of what your value proposition is, what you love to do, what you do well, what your market is looking for, then you can develop a pitch, essentially a mission statement around that value proposition that you feel comfortable about.

And if you're comfortable about, if not excited about what it is that you do, what it is that you want to do, where you want to take your career, ideas that you have about this, then you don't have to "network", right? You don't have to do the silly questions that come up in a forced networking event situation.

You can just talk about what you love. And engage from that perspective, and you're not looking for everyone to connect with you and to be thrilled and interested in what you do, you're looking for those few people who are interested, right? And you're looking for the few people whose work you're interested in.

You're looking to build a community in this process. It's not about how many business cards you have or how many contacts you have on LinkedIn. It's about the quality of those contacts. It's about their ability to support you, your ability to support them. And that's how you're going to build the referral network that's going to get you the job that you want. 

David Rice: It's interesting. You talked about value proposition a little bit. And as you age, I think you have to think about that differently and you have to change how you engage with interviewers, your LinkedIn, we all want to believe that we're up to date on the latest cutting edge trends and technology.

You want to position yourself to compete, but you really have to be clear about like the value that you're going to bring and that does evolve. Right. So, take us through sort of identifying that a little bit, understanding where you are in your career and how you recommend to people that they position it when they speak to people or put themselves out there.

John Tarnoff: In my view, there are three elements to successful career management. And we're talking about networking before and about what I call the superpower, this idea that you want to really focus in on the skills, experiences, the values, the insights that you bring to the table in your work. You want to bring a kind of a whole person approach to your career persona, if you will.

And if you can define that and articulate that, and it's, it takes some time. You want to be reflective about this. I ask all my clients to start a daily journal where it's very much of a stream of consciousness thing, but capturing ideas, capturing frustrations. Developing a dialogue with your subconscious in a way to really tap into what's really authentic about you.

These are the qualities that are going to stand out and differentiate you from your competition. That's what the superpower does. So once you've defined that superpower. That gives you the leverage to go out and connect with people because you've got something to talk about. And you're looking for, again, as with networking, you're looking for the people that you make the connection with, not necessarily everyone.

It's the old marketing line. If your product is for everyone, it's actually for no one, right? You want to find specifically those people who resonate with what you offer. And you want to build that pitch, right? That value proposition based on the interaction that you experience and encounter with these people that you're going to start talking to and the conversations you're going to have, the informational meetings you're going to have with people.

Just a note on the job interview process. With more experience and more aptitude, you want to be interviewing that company as much as they're interviewing you. This is no longer about, Oh, please, sir. I need a job. This is about, wait a minute. If I'm going to be successful here, I want to make sure that all of my boxes are checked with you. Just reading an article this morning about a woman somewhere on Medium talking about this experience she had with a company that was just disastrous. She was there for, I think, maybe less than six months or something, and she quit, but she talks about how she ignored the red flags going in to the company.

And she was so dazzled by kind of the PR that they were feeding her that she did not pay attention to the facts of the job. One of which was the fact that there had been four people in that position and over the prior 18 months. So what does that tell you? Beyond the networking. And the referral network and the interaction between the superpower and the people that are aligned with your way of thinking, you want to also.

Define yourself as a thought leader, particularly someone with experience. That's another way to distinguish yourself and whether this is engaging on LinkedIn, whether this is offline, whether this is with professional organizations, whether you're doing adjunct teaching work, whether you're writing blogging, you've got that shingle or that profile on Medium or Substack or whatever it is, or you're podcasting, you're doing what you and I are doing here.

You want to be able to express clear differentiators. You want to stand up for what you stand for around your business so that people can get a sense of how you think and what are you beyond the job that you do, but within your profession, right? How strategic are you? Are you someone that they want to have in a meeting that there are you someone they want to call in to be part of the decision making process?

So this gives you an opportunity as a thalier to exercise some of those valuable skills that you're going to use in any job that you pursue. So those three elements together are a flywheel that just keeps getting more and more productive. As you engage with the value that you're expressing and offering through your value proposition, perfecting it, refining it through the conversations and the relationships that you're building with your community.

And then again, through the engagement and the reach that you're building. The sense of trust and expertise that you're building through your thought leadership. 

David Rice: Now you're in the early stages of developing what you call the Mid-Career Lab. I know it's still early on, but talk to us about what your goals are with that and what you're hoping to achieve.

John Tarnoff: Well, thanks for asking about that. So this is, I think, an expression of what's going on, I think, in our world today, which is this quest for community, this idea that we want to be able to not just take information and instruction from a single trusted source, but we want to be able to engage with other people who are on the same path that we are and, life and technology give us these opportunities today so that I felt like it's all well and good for me to be talking on a podcast or to have a blog and to be sharing on LinkedIn and that's all great and you're getting me one to one or one to many and I thought what really Makes the difference is for people to engage with one another.

So the Mid-Career Lab was something that I started community site to get people involved with talking to one another about their career issues, their wins, their challenges. And learning from one another. I want to be the shepherd kind of go in and try to help direct it. But I want people to learn from one another and help themselves, lift themselves up by their bootstraps so that we can all find solutions.

So I can learn more about how people are coping with these crazy times. So that's the idea. 

David Rice: Excellent. Well, before we go, I just wanted to give you a chance to tell people a little bit more about where they can connect with you, find out more about what you have going on and to see how the Mid-Career Lab develops.

John Tarnoff: Sure. So I think I'm the only John Tarnoff on LinkedIn. So that's the great place to start. So just search for me on LinkedIn and then I have a website, johntarnoff.com. You can also find me at midcareerlab.com, which is the kind of the landing page for the community and explore there. So that's it. I'm very accessible.

David Rice: And the last thing is we have a little tradition here on the podcast where you get to ask me a question. So I want to turn it over to you. You can ask me something. It can be anything you want. 

John Tarnoff: Oh, absolutely. So I've been looking forward to this. So David, I will observe that you have a little bit of gray in your beard. How are you dealing with being a mid-career professional? How is that going? 

David Rice: It's a challenge. I'm not going to lie. Like if you're working in media, AI is becoming more and more a part of what we do every day. We're constantly in this moment where I keep questioning, is it good to simplify this?

Because we've been doing this for a long time in media where we're constantly trying to simplify things down, make things for the shorter attention span. And I don't know as it's served anybody in reality. You look at the way, the level of discourse that we're at as a nation around any key topic, everything, right?

You look at the way that we are sort of reacting to whatever happens in the world. I don't know if this is necessarily serving us and on an ethical level, should we keep bite sizing everything when things are complicated, things need nuance and context and. And so we're in this really interesting moment right now in particular, because we all know that like, short form video or this or that there's a million different content types now, and there's a million different ways to break things out.

And we've got to get better as storytellers to be able to bring all that context and nuance, but in, and make it in all these digestible pieces and all these formats and make it make sense. This is one of the most challenging times, I think, and it's going to be interesting going forward. So, and as a person who's been in the game for a while, so to speak, it's fascinating to watch the way that we're reacting as an industry to every change because.

I feel like we're bad at learning lessons. And as you get older, you're like, I don't want to waste a whole lot of time. Right. I want to learn my lessons and apply them. Right. So it tends to be just something that I watch with interest. 

John Tarnoff: It would be great if it was the matrix and they could just, throw the disc in and we would be, learning, it's like, I know Kung Fu.

It's like, it would be, that would be great. I really like what you're saying about this and I really hear the concern and I agree with the issue. One thing I would offer up just from my background in, in production and movies and TV is that there's something about serial storytelling, which I think applies here.

And we're used to watching TV series, right? And if we get hooked into the TV series, we're hooked into the TV series. And I think TV series have now grown into this amazing storytelling institution where you're really able to tell long form stories, novel sized stories over the course of a season or the course of two or three seasons.

In a way that you never could before. And I think that to me that, I mean, people are watching long running multi hour shows. So the attention span required for that is significant. And people are putting in the hours. I think there's a willingness. I think it's our responsibility as creators and storytellers find that serial hook to find that story, that angle that's going to continue to absorb.

Our audience and maybe to create cliffhangers at the end of a segment relates it to something else that's coming up or something else that's out there. And it's more than just, if you like this video, then click here for more. I mean, that, that doesn't do it. That's just gone off into the ether.

It's almost like, I mean, this is bad, but you want to be able to say, if you want to see the next step to this. Click here's where this goes anyway, subject of another entire podcast, I'm sure. But that would be to me the way I think we can start to tackle this. 

David Rice: Yeah, no, I agree with you. And it's just about like, it doesn't have to live on one platform. The pieces can build on each other and understanding that and figuring it out, how it all connects is a big part of it. 

Well, John, I want to thank you for coming on today. This was great. 

John Tarnoff: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of fun to talk to you, David. Thanks so much. 

David Rice: Excellent. 

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