Before you make a final decision when making a career change over 40, you will need to do some detailed career research. This will help you look at the career options available to you and to work out the different routes you can take to get the qualifications and experience you need to reach your goal.

General Online Research

This can help you to look at the broad picture and give you some ideas as a starting point. So you can search for very general themes such as jobs with travel, jobs abroad, jobs for liberal arts graduates and so on. You could make a list of the roles and interests you have had and search using those. Examples might be jobs for mothers, jobs with languages, jobs for sports enthusiasts or jobs relating to cooking or looking after children.

You could even chose unspecified searches such as “Jobs related to” which at the time of writing brings back a lot of interesting results. Or you could go for terms directly related to mid life career change, like “jobs over 40″, “careers for older people”or “careers for introverts” (or extroverts). “Careers for the future” is a good one if you plan to stay employed for a long time. Make sure you put quotation marks around the terms so that you get results which are optimized for that phrase. Otherwise you will get a lot of general results about careers and jobs which aren’t relevant to your query.

Specific Online Research

Once you have identified some potential career areas or specific jobs, specific research is the next step. There are many sites which will help you to understand careers and what is needed to gain entry to them. Most countries also have government run sites which provide full job descriptions, along with details of qualifications needed and prospects within the career. You can also use these sites to find additional careers which are related to the one which originally interested you.

Offline Research

There are many ways in which you can do some research offline. Job fairs and company recruitment days, as well as college open days are all good ways of getting some face to face advice from experts involved in specific careers.

College or career libraries will also have a wide range of books which go into great detail about careers and the job opportunities within each field.

Talking to people actually involved in the career is another good way of getting an insider’s viewpoint. Use your own contacts to find people doing the jobs you are interested in. Often a friend of a friend will be able to give you useful information. Alternatively, get in touch with companies or organization where you would like to be employed and ask if you can have a short chat with someone in the HR department or someone doing a particular job.

Getting Career Advice

Going to see a careers advisor can be a useful way of gaining information. Advisors will have access to a great deal of relevant material and will also be able to talk you through your ideas and if necessary help you to find alternatives