3 Career Pivot Community Members Pivoted to an Encore Career

Career Pivot Community Members Pivoted to an Encore Career

In this post, I want to give you 3 examples of people who have pivoted to an Encore Career. All of these gentlemen have made their pivot while being part of the Career Pivot membership community.

In my previous post, Encore Career Redefined in the Post COVID-19 Pandemic World, I gave you my definition of an encore career:

An encore career is typically pursued for personal fulfillment which can include its public or social purpose and a sense of fulfillment as well as for financial reasons.

These 3 individuals have very different financial requirements for their encore career and they fit roughly into the categories that I defined in the previous post:

• Volunteerism
• Work at Something Related to Your Previous Career
• Pursue Something Totally New

Pursuing a Portfolio of Coaching and Teaching

Alec Arons spent much of his career in corporate finance consulting. He retired in 2019 with the thought he would become a business coach. At the same time, he wanted to reignite his passion for photography which he dropped many years earlier.

Alec’s financial goals are to make enough money to fund his photography and other non-work interests.

Alec has built out a very nice portfolio of coaching and teaching. He has been teaching an online course for a professional association in the area of financial audits. It is something he can do in his sleep even when the work is sporadic, however, it pays well.

Alec has attained his International Coaching Federation Associate Certified Coach accreditation. While he was pursuing his certification his website was then launched at AronsCoaching.com.

His initial prospecting for individuals clients was slow. Like most new coaches, he found this frustrating. He investigated several coaching platforms and the one that has worked the best for him has been BetterUp. You may have heard about the BetterUp platform because Prince Harry is their Chief Impact Officer.

On top of all of that Alec is leading a “circle” called Designing Your Next Best Life for Amava.com. He is also leading a circle called Photography Workshop – Travel.

Career Pivot has partnered with 2 Silicon Valley startups in the education space, Amava.com, and GetSetUp.io.

He has also enrolled to run a group for Vistage. Vistage is the world’s largest executive coaching organization for small and midsize businesses.

Alec even has a few other endeavors in the works. Will all of this pan out? Maybe – maybe not – but he is learning a lot.

Alec is a very busy man right now but you can definitely say he has pivoted to an encore career.

Town Councilman for His Home Town

David Jenkins spent much of his career inside and outside of state and local government. He also served in the US Army National Guard for 38 years, which included being deployed to Bosnia about 20 years ago.

When David came to the Career Pivot community 3 plus years ago, he was the CEO of the Southern Maryland Association of REALTORS®. This was a job that David did not enjoy and finally left to pursue a couple of different pursuits. He taught an online business course for the University of Maryland. He also became a Business Consultant for his local Small Business Development Center(SBDC).

As he discovered teaching online is very different than teaching in person. He taught for several semesters but decided that this was not for him. He enjoyed the work at the SBDC but did not like how closely his work was measured. In many ways, this felt like a sales job where all of his work was measured. After a little over a year, David decided this was not for him and he retired.

David spent the next two years volunteering on several committees for the town of La Plata Maryland. He started a blog on the topic of the importance of placemaking and planning for our communities. David learned a lot of new skills.

He was then told by several people inside and outside of the La Plata town government that he should run for a town council seat. He did… and he WON!

You can listen to him tell his story on running his first political campaign in the podcast episode Learning How to Run a Successful Political Campaign in the 2nd Half of Life [Podcast].

David is receiving a small salary for serving but the money is not a factor in wanting to serve his township.

He is really being stretched but you can definitely say he has pivoted to an encore career.

An Encore Career Teaching for a Startup but That is not the Endpoint

Russ Eanes has had an eclectic career. Before coming to the Career Pivot community he spent 11 years running MennoMedia, which is the publishing arm of the Mennonite Church. As time went on he drew weary of shrinking the organization and laying off friends. In 2018, he laid himself off and took a year off to find himself. I love his comment to me where he said, “I had to admit I was lost before I could find a new direction”.

He hiked the Camino Santiago pilgrimage and decided to write a book about it. He wrote The Walk of a Lifetime: 500 Miles on the Camino de Santiago. He self-published the book through Amazon KDP service and IngramSpark in September of 2019.

The book has sold very well and he was doing live events when the pandemic hit. The Career Pivot community helped Russ move to online events over Zoom and FaceBook live. The problem was that he already had plans for the next book about a similar trek across Italy. That was put on hold.

You can listen to Russ tell his story on the podcast in the post, 2021 Update – Walk of a Lifetime into a Writing and Consulting Career With Russ Eanes [Podcast].

In late 2019, one of the Career Pivot Community members discovered GetSetUp. Their “About Us” section on their website states the following:

Wrap Up

All three of these stories are different. Alec and Russ are doing something that has some attachment to their past but is really quite different.  David is leveraging his past experience in working in government to make a difference in his local community.

Alec wants to make some money to fund his activities. David gets a small salary as a town councilman but the was NOT his motivation. Russ still needs to make a living.