Katherine Brown
I'm creative, curious and very much a people person.
So when I found myself a little stuck in terms of my next career act, I used these traits to look at the problem from a different angle.
The solution was The 50:50 Project - an active experiment to expand the conversation, ask better questions and find inspiration in the stories of others.
Why The 50:50 Project
Simply put, looking for work in your 50s is challenging. Trying to find truly interesting and fulfilling work even more so. Add to the mix a few career breaks and a desire to transition to a new career and it is easy to despair. But don’t, you are not alone. There are literally millions of people across the globe who’ve wrestled with these same issues and come out the other side. The 50:50 Project taps into this experience and expertise to help you move forward.
How to design a better life
The approach of The 50:50 Project is partly influenced by Bill Burnet and Dave Evans’ book Design Your Life: Build the Perfect Career Step by Step. Drawing on design thinking principles, Burnet and Evans believe anyone can create their ideal work life if they use a designer’s mind-set. The designer’s mindset teaches you to be curious, try stuff (their words), reframe the problem, recognise it’s a process and most importantly ask for help (what they call radical collaboration).
What I love about their approach is it is active. When you’re stuck you need to move - you can’t think you way out of a situation. That’s often how you got stuck in the first place - over thinking!! By worrying less about the final destination, you learn to forge your way forward by experimenting, questioning and learning as you go. You become an explorer on a path and it all seems a little less scary and a little more do-able.
What to expect
The 50:50 Project is a mix of bite size interviews with a wide range of professionals from different sectors - entrepreneurs, academics, corporates and creatives and different countries - UK, US, Canada, Sweden, France to name a few.
Each interviewee is asked eight questions starting with a short introduction to their career twists and turns and ending with recommendations. It’s said that better questions results in better answers and better answers result in better thinking and problem solving - so we’re continually tinkering with the questions to make sure we’re able to draw out the best ideas and inspirations.
Interspersed throughout the interviews are deeper dives into some of the topics discussed from How to Ask Better Questions to What To Do When Your Are Stuck? Over time we will be adding more resources including practical advice and tips to help you find your next act.
What do you think? We want to hear your thoughts on how we can make The 50:50 Project better. Please get in touch
Listen to my interviews with Dave Watts of the Redundancy Podcast
30 June 2021
There is no ‘Perfect Time’
Waiting for the perfect time. With your Unicorn. In Camelot. You’re 50+, you’re unemployed, you can’t get a job and you’ve come to the realisation that you may no longer be employable in mainstream work.
What do you do? You could sit back and wait for the 'perfect time' to make your move.
Hint - there is no ‘perfect’ time. Katherine Brown, in the 50fiftyproject, set out to talk to 50 older entrepreneurs, learn what makes them successful, what motivates them and why they took the decisions they did.
30 April 2020
Increase your odds of finding work at fifty by drinking coffee.
'If there is no wind then row.' Finding a new job as an older worker is hard at the best of times. The 50:50 project sets out to talk to 50 inspiring people who have found a job, retrained and/or started a new career. Find out what worked and what the pitfalls were. And, when we find some sort of normality again, great places to drink coffee.