I am definitely coasting in my corporate career now, at age 55. I had a great 20 years as a software engineer, then a mediocre 10 years as a business analyst. In all that time I’ve never found myself in an environment that really challenged me in terms of career growth, never found a mentor to coach me in the areas where I lacked professional maturity and leadership skills. I’m tired of trying to figure that out on my own. I’m tired of getting consistent “exceeds expectations” performance reviews but never apparently being good enough for promotion. I’m done with all that, and am just riding out a few more months until I retire early.
Having said that, I am still building up my own small business as a third career. I will likely also freelance business analysis tasks for extra money.
I am at least 15 years from retirement (age 50) and I am behind in my retirement savings goals.
But yes, in a way I want to ride it out until retirement. What I mean by that:
[ul]
[li]I work hard every single day, I am not coasting or doing the bare-minimum required of me to get by in the middle of the pack.[/li][li]I am a top performer as an individual contributor in our organization and as such I am well compensated and highly valued by our leadership.[/li][li]I’ve been around long enough to know the above may be some minimal level of protection from being arbitrarily added to a RIF but I understand everyone is replaceable. My employer could fire me tomorrow without any reason.[/li][li]I would be happy to remain in my current role until retirement. Although being offered a promotion would be a nice ego stroke, I’m not desiring or pushing for a move out of my current role to a leadership position at this stage.[/li][li]I am more motivated in my current role by having earned (and continue to earn) the respect of my peers, company leadership, our clients and industry people and by being an integral part of our business reaching our goals every year than say… a title or added responsibilities.[/li][li]Stability is more important to me than advancement with added risk/rewards.[/li][/ul]
I’m fully vested in my company’s pension, Medicare-eligible, and don’t care for my job. I’m not retired because my wife isn’t there yet, and thinks I’ll be bored if I’m not working and she is (I think she’s wrong, but I’m not willing to die on that hill.) So hell yeah, I’m coasting. The only reason i show up at all is that I really like getting my performance-based annual bonus.
Up until a year ago I really liked my job and felt no urgency at all about retiring. But that changed.
The nice thing, though…for my entire 40+ year career I’ve always felt anxiety about layoffs – is one coming? Will I be spared? I feel like I’ve successfully avoided the Grim Reaper and made it to the finish line. In the unlikely event of a layoff at my company now, I’d raise my hand and say “take me!”
I was sort of forced to coast for the last couple of years before I retired. I had been in charge of supporting a lot of the software that our department used, as well as training in that software, for a long time. My boss for several years before those last two years kept me out of everything new, so that my job dwindled slowly over time. When that boss left, the department was re-arranged and I was under someone who didn’t know I existed. Basically, for the last 6 months, I spent at least half of my time doing nothing productive. What few duties I still had when I left were spread around various other people who got no increase in pay for doing the extra work. Management was not concerned about the company’s loss of my 34 years of institutional knowledge.
It was a very disappointing way to end a career. I understand the imperative from a management point of view, that they didn’t want someone nearing retirement to be indispensable. I wish there could have been some other approach.
Right now the institutional knowledge of how to deliver medical care for nearly 25,000 current patients in my state’s prison system resides in the heads of just two people, and I’m the most senior of us two. And we’re both looking at retirement relatively soon.
A lot of my time is spent telling our newer managers about why things are the way they are, and what happened last time we tried doing things they way they’re telling us to do them now. I’ve prevented the hiring of some incompetent folks who used to work for us, because nobody else remembered what happened last time we hired them. I’ve also managed to hire folks who helped us so much last time, over their initial objections, because of their less than stellar resumes.
I’m not stuck in the past, resisting change because it’s new. I have shepherded in enough effective (and some ineffective) changes in my career to know we need to keep changing. But I am veteran government employee who knows enough about the bureaucracy to foresee the disasters coming from some proposed changes.
I’ve found that there are two types of managers. One type knows what everyone does, and their skills, understanding that some workers are replaceable. The other type sees almost everyone as a cog, except for a few superstars.
The latter ones get surprised when a cog leaves and al of a sudden no one knows how to do their job. But this manager finds it much easier to lay of 20% of their staff. What could go wrong?
