Do you no longer your career? If you hate your job, know that roughly 2/3rds of employees are disengaged, which means your situation is quite normal. You might want to do something entirely different before time’s up for you, but is it too late to change careers?

In this post, instead of just feeding you platitudes and just say unanimously, “yes, it’s never too late to change careers,” I’ll give you real talk. I’ll go over a specific situations and give guidance on each scenario.

Under 30 Years Old, And Not Starting A Family Yet

In this case, it’s not too late to change careers. You still have 30-40 years ahead of you to explore your own skills, talents, and choose the path that’s the perfect fit for you.

When you’re this young and have no family to take care of, you have nothing to lose.

Don’t let the fear of switching it up leave you with decades of regret.

Around 30s-40s, But Not Starting A Family

You have somewhat less time than someone in their early 20s.

But realistically you’ll be pigeonholed by your experience. For example, corporations generally want to do “safe hires.” Someone with a completely different experience in their resume makes for a very risky higher. They have no reason to take a chance on you.

You’ve got a few choices here to confront this issue.

1. Fabricate bullet points on your resume so you can talk about it in an interview.
   1. Example: Say you’re in hardware engineering, and you want to get into software engineering. Throughout your work history, just fabricate software engineering related tasks throughout so it looks like you have experience. Just make sure 1) you study software hard enough to pass the tech interview, and 2) you get your fabricated work straight so there’s no plot holes in your resume.
   1. This is quite Machiavellian but this is the most likely way you won’t take a huge pay cut when you land the job in a new career.
2. Grow a conscience and be honest. But realize that: 1) it’ll take you much longer to find a job in another career, and 2) you’ll take a huge pay cut when you do.

As I’m quite conservative, here’s my recommendation: be mostly financial independent before you attempt to change careers.

• Reason 1: If you switch careers and you want to be honest about your resume = huge pay decrease. Thus, you need some passive income to dampen the blow.
• Reason 2: Without having done the actual tasks in this new career, you actually have no clue if you like it. You might hate it and want to quit. If you quit, it may be hard to get back onto your original career path since your tenure at your new career path might be viewed as a gap year.

The corporate world generally does not accept any outliers and just want safe hires. So if you have a gap year it’s going to be a lot harder to switch back to your old career should you want a fallback.

40+ Years Old, And No Plans To Start A Family

• If you’ve invested enough money and haven’t squandered it, you should be pretty close to financially free already. Refer to the section below if you’re not close to financially free.
• Thus, you’re very well positioned and it’s not too late to change careers at all. It’s almost the perfect time.
• You might YOLO quit at this point and just start from scratch on a new career, or even start building your own business from scratch. The world is your oyster.

Starting A Family, Or 40+ Years Old But Not Close To Financially Free

In this case, you either 1) have real financial responsibilities, or 2) are running out of time to change careers and make a ton of mistakes.

In these cases, I recommend having enough passive income to replace your expenses so you can completely support your family (or yourself) before switching careers.

A few ways to make enough passive income to replace your expenses:

• Start a side hustle that’ll replace your W-2 income. But if you succeed with this, I’m not sure why you’d want to change careers. If you still want to switch, then you can outsource most of your side hustle and then use it to support you as you change careers.
  • Make sure to read my posts on various side hustle ideas if this is a path you want to pursue. This path is quite hard, but is faster than this next choice.
• Cut expenses, and wait a bit longer by building up your investments so it spits out enough passive income to replace your expenses.
  • This is very easy, but much slower than starting a side hustle. I would recommend doing this in conjunction with a side hustle so you maximize your chances.
  • Though you can semi-YOLO this and switch careers as your investments are “close enough” to covering your expenses. For example, while you’ll take a pay cut (if you didn’t follow my instructions above about lying on your resume), you won’t be paid 0. As such, if your passive income is covering 80% of your expenses, it’s likely that your new job can cover the rest.

This is the hardest situation to switch careers but is most definitely possible.

So…Is It Too Late To Change Careers?

At the end of the day, question of if it’s too late to change careers is like asking if it’s too late to start living your life the way you want.

The answer is “no,” it’s never “too late” unless you’re literally on your deathbed. However, your journey to make the switch can be considerably easier or harder depending on your situation.

When you’re planning out your career switch, I’d start with the end in mind.

As such, my recommendation is to know when you should quit your job so you can pick a financial goalpost, or work backwards from there.

Or, you can just YOLO quit your job tomorrow.

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