You may have found yourself in a position where you have been downsized from your job and prospects for new employment are limited.  If it seems like your career that was once in demand is now diminished, you may ask yourself, “should I make a career change?”

Since the new millennium started, our world has changed quite a bit from what we knew before.  We noticed the change, but many people thought it was just a phase we were going through and things would sooner or later return to “normal” as we knew it.  But then time went on.  After some time, it became clear that the state of the economy is not just a trough that we’re in; it is the new norm.  A new world economy and order has been ushered in whether we were ready for it or not.

 What the new world economy means to us is that low to moderate competition in manufacturing and other areas has now become highly competitive on a worldwide basis because the Internet and other technologies has made research, vendor access, and shipping methodologies very easy to find and compare for best rates.  You can think of it like travel agencies.  Yesteryear, you went to a travel agency to acquire information for airline ticket, hotel, and rental car rate comparisons.  Now it is very easy to do yourself; and on airplanes, you can even choose where you want to sit on a particular flight.  The same benefits are available to industry to shop around for best labor rates, culture and geography comparisons, international tax rates, shipping rates between different carriers, and laws of the land.  It gives business planners a good head start in researching and laying the foundation for future manufacturing plans.

 The new world economy has been good news for countries with low labor rates.  It brought jobs and higher prosperity to many areas around the globe.  The new world economy has been not-so-good news for highly developed countries with high labor costs.  Executive managers found it much easier and cheaper to pack it up and move operations to foreign lands, while telling domestic workers and labor unions to pack their stuff up and take a long, long, long vacation.

 Given that, if your job was outsourced overseas, or new technologies has made it obsolete, should you consider a career change to find profitable and gainful employment again?  The answer may be an astounding “yes” in many cases.  If you have quite some time to go before you consider yourself retired and you feel open to new career choices and challenges, then a career change may be for you.  Even if you are in you 50s or 60s, this may still be a viable option.  This is true because you have experiences that are transferable into different fields.  With medical advances, people are living longer now and feel up to the capability of working an extra two years or more before retiring.

 Everything changes so fast anyway nowadays, especially in the area of technology.  About the time something is developed and placed on the market, it becomes obsolete in a couple of years.  Think of all those new phones and tablets that came to the market not too long ago.  People paid big bucks to have the latest and greatest. Within a year or two, they took a back seat to the next generation of devices.  Few people then had any interest in the first generation devices.  Jobs are the same way.  One day companies can’t get enough people of a certain type of skill set and the next day they want something new with a total disinterest in the first skill.  If your job isn’t coming back anytime soon and you’re open to learning a new skill or career, it may very well be worth your while to make a career change.

 If the cost of an education is a consideration for you, you should look into grants and scholarships.  If you can’t pay cash for your education without any financial stress on your pocketbook, this is the best way to go.  If you’re out of work or underemployed, getting a student loan to get a college degree should be done with much reservation in a tight job market.  More often than not, your payments will become due shortly after graduation and you sure don’t need that financial stress while you’re unemployed and looking for work, or in a situation of underemployment.  You want to be sure to do your homework and some research to find out how others like you have benefited from student loans in your newly chosen career field.  How fast did they find employment in your area (get recent statistics) and what was their starting pay?  What kinds of people were hired?  Did the cost of the student loan pay off in the long run or did the cost of the education exceed the salaries realized while gainfully employed in that field?  The life expectancy of the chosen career should have a good return on investment.  You probably don’t want to go back to school and pay over one hundred grand for ten years of education if you only plan on working a couple years in the field.

 For most readers, employer tuition reimbursement probably isn’t an option since they probably won’t even be on this website.  However, for the few that do have employer tuition reimbursement available to them, they need to check with their human resources office for details on how it works.

 If circumstances dictate that it makes sense for you to make a career change, make sure you pick something you enjoy doing.  You don’t want to get bogged down with just another job that gets you from paycheck to paycheck.  You want it to be fun to where you enjoy going to work everyday; even Mondays.  You want your new career to be you.