Late Stage Career | ProCoder Software

Late Stage Career

In the later years of your career you will want to focus on several things.

• 1. Maintaining your current job and career goals.
• 2. Planning for retirement and where the retirement income is coming from.
• 3. What date you will retire and the steps you need to do before that time.
• 4. Where do you plan to live after retirement and what activities do you enjoy.

Moving Up

When you get to the later stages of your career, say 10 to 15 years later you need to start focusing on moving up in your company. By this point you will have more experience in technology. To stay valuable to the company you work for you often have to move up to management positions.

As you get older maintaining your programming skills becomes harder. It is also harder to find jobs as a programmer unless you are talented and specialized in one area. Then your company may keep you because you are highly effective. But at some point you will need to start preparing for retirement.

Invest Early

If you have been saving and investing your whole career you should be ready for retirement. It is important to have invested as much as possible early on in your career, so those investments have time to grow. If you wait to pay off debt or pay off your house before you start investing you will have lost years of investment growth. You will end up with less money in your investment account at retirement. So start investing early.

When to Retire

You may want to write in your career plan how many years in the future do you plan to retire and what your target investment amount will be to support you in retirement. You may also want to talk to a financial planner to figure out how much you will need to retire. Bankrate web site also has some good retirement calculators to help you run what-if scenarios.

Pay Off House

If you have a house pay it off before you retire. This means the large mortgage payment is gone which significantly lessens your monthly expenses making it easier to retire.

The earlier you pay off your house in your career the more money you will be able to comfortably invest. This generally leads to more retirement savings.

Age Bias in Hiring

As you develop into the later years of your career age bias in interviews shows up. Knowing how to deal with it constructively can be hard. To help I found this video that explains how to reframe your experience and teamwork as an asset. This makes you a valuable hire.