Clarity counts: Exploring new career identities at 50

A tale of unexpected challenges, reinvention, and valuable lessons

When we decided to move to France in 2018, most people we knew were very jealous. For a New Zealander (with a French wife) living in Australia at the time, this bold lifestyle change was going to be a big, important step for the family.

But for me, it initially lead to a major career blockage. It was a tough period, and it led me to question the value of all my career experience up to that point.

But a chance discovery followed by a sliding doors moment pointed me in a new direction. I’ve emerged with a renewed career identity and a clearer view of the possibilities and opportunities ahead.

This article is a reflection on what I’ve learned, what I’ve built so far, and what I can see ahead.

Bienvenue en France!

Our motives for moving to France were well-founded. Our young kids would be immersed in their mum’s language and culture, and my wife would be closer to her friends and family. I’d be challenged to improve my French to a passable standard, find a new role, and adapt to a different workplace culture.

I expected that I’d have to realign my career direction to some extent, and I was ready for this.

Workwise, I’m a generalist. Although I’d spent most of my career in one industry (magazine distribution), I’d been able to move through a wide variety of roles as I needed new challenges - and I’m grateful for having good managers that enabled and encouraged this. But as declining revenue eventually brought on serious downsizing in that industry, I found a great new role in a very different business, managing service delivery for a government-funded disability communication service in Sydney.

I knew by then that I enjoy operational management roles most. I’d built a lot of useful skills and experience at the intersection where teams, processes and technology meet - not so much a niche, more like a broad domain where I could contribute in many different ways.

On arriving in France, my priorities were to improve my French and to renovate the old house we’d bought near Bordeaux. With intensive language lessons and tutoring in between some large building projects, I was making progress - but to get to the next level, I needed to be speaking and hearing French for long periods every day, and I wasn’t doing this while working on the house.

To improve my French, I needed to find a job. But to find a job, I needed to improve my French. Can you spot the predicament?

Career blockage

I needed to find a role working mostly in English, to start with at least. It needed to be in or around Bordeaux (pop: 800,000), although more widespread remote working in the wake of Covid did eventually relax this criterion.

As a generalist, moving (out of necessity) into an industry I hadn’t worked in before, it was not easy to demonstrate how I met the specific skill sets most roles required. It took a lot of analysis to find the right angle to concisely explain my value, so each application I submitted was about two weeks’ work on average. I was selective in the roles I applied for, but I got into a pretty good rhythm, and over 12 months I submitted 20 very carefully thought-out, strongly-argued applications.

The responses? Mostly, crickets. I was in my late 40s, and despite the ‘equal opportunities’ paragraph at the bottom of every role description, I’m sure my age often mattered when it came to avoiding the initial ‘no’ pile.

[Aside: it also annoys me how companies, who invite candidates to do huge amounts of intense work and put themselves through the hope-fueled emotional wringer, can choose not to take three minutes to offer any brief explanation for the reasons for their decision. In many cases, I’m fairly sure my applications were never even read by a human. But that’s all a subject for another day].

In those 12 months, from 20 applications I’d landed two first (remote) interviews. One went pretty well, the other not so well; neither proceeded any further. How long was I going to continue down this all-consuming path? Was I barking up the wrong tree?

But one last job ad really caught my eye - and I was more suited to this Business Operations Manager role than almost any other. They worked mainly in English, and they genuinely sounded like a company that would be willing to consider someone with, let’s say, plenty of experience. But, intriguingly, the job title included a term I’d hardly heard before. What did they mean by ‘No-code Maker’? I had to find out.

Discovering No-code

‘No-code’ is the term for the vast (and growing) range of online tools now available which allow people who are not developers to build entire solutions - almost anything from websites to process automation, database applications, CRMs, and marketing funnels, and to connect them together easily. Although I had only used a few of the more recent tools, I realised that I was actually a pretty experienced No-code Maker - I’d been building applications in Excel, the original and most widely-used no-code tool, for many years.

I wrote one, last, really good application. It struck a chord, and I passed one, two, then three interviews (one of them in French!), and nailed an assignment. I was awaiting some good news.

The news eventually came: a hiring freeze. The young company’s revenue growth had plateaued, and although I was their top choice for the role, it would be a minimum of 6 months before they could consider bringing me on. This particular door slid closed right in front of me.

But it felt like a turning point. Realising now how much I could build using no-code tools (and having a head start from learning basic programming as a kid), I began to feel unblocked. I’d have a strong new string to my bow for operations roles; but there were also new career paths in view. Indie hacker? Startup founder? Should I buy a €300 pair of sneakers?

I took a short course in building with the most popular no-code tools, and the revelations began to flow. I rebuilt a family member’s website in an afternoon. I soon discovered Bildr and realised it was powerful enough to be the main tool in my toolbox, even though the learning curve was notoriously steep.

I needed to build something in Bildr to demonstrate what I could do, and wanted to start with something fairly simple.

Chess lessons

I decided to start by building a chess puzzle website. I enjoyed doing chess puzzles, where you need to find the best sequence of moves from a given position on a chess board. The project gave me the chance to learn how to plug in external resources, integrate with other platforms, hook it together with some fairly complicated logic, and add some nice features to make it an enjoyable and challenging mental exercise.

I’m proud of the result: Chess Connect. But by the time I’d finished, it had evolved into more than just a practice project - I’d accidentally built a fully-fledged consumer web app. This was never the original aim, so I certainly hadn't followed the best-practice process that every good indie hacker knows: start with the customer problem you want to solve, identify distribution channels and monetisation strategy, and then finally decide what the solution looks like.

How much of a life of its own Chess Connect gains, as a revenue-earning product, depends to some extent on how much I invest in marketing it. But as a practice project and a showcase for what I can build, I'm happy that it's been successful. And, I certainly learned some really useful lessons:

• It was a great way to learn the Bildr platform, and I’m now confident using all of its most powerful features.
• I made many first-time product development mistakes, which I won’t make again.
• I really can build a pretty amazing web app.

I was really enjoying the process of building Chess Connect. I’d been researching and following startup and entrepreneurship culture, and staying in touch with the latest developments (especially AI). Although I’d never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur, the ideas began to flow. I could see myself evolving into a proper indie hacker, and in my more imaginative moments, maybe even as a startup founder. Could I forge a new career building web apps which bring in the holy grail, MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)?

Gaining clarity

It’s been a winding path, but after gaining important new skills and some honest reflection, I feel I now have career clarity. Not certainty on exactly what’s ahead; but clarity on the range of paths that are available to me, and that I have the ability and desire to follow.

After a brief taste, do I really want to be an indie hacker? As a generalist, I’m confident I can do most things well enough, and get help and advice on others. But, truthfully, there are some pretty fundamental parts of the indie hacker job description (mostly in the marketing and sales domains), that I just can’t get so enthusiastic about.

Also, I miss having colleagues, teammates, and the synergies (and challenges) of working together with other people to achieve important things.

I don’t feel a strong need to be an entrepreneur, but I’ve always valued working with people (collaborators or clients) who have an entrepreneurial spirit, in the sense that they want to find better ways of doing more things.

From here, my aim is to bring together the three major themes from my career so far: operations, development, and entrepreneurship. I want to find and deliver solutions in the space where these three elements meet, boosted by my new capabilities. This might be in an employment role, freelancing, consulting, tool development, or in a collaboration that involves a combination of these.

I have a website coming soon to explain this in more detail to future collaborators, employers, and clients. It will be part CV, part personal portfolio, part portal for putting ideas into the world, and part home for future collaborations.

I’ve realised there are new directions possible beyond building web apps; and now I’m starting to have this figured out, it feels exciting.

Possibilities and opportunities

This is also a shout-out to potential future collaborators, clients, and employers, in all forms. Here’s a little more about me.

• What do I stand for? I believe that operational excellence can be a strategic advantage.
• What do I do best? Planning and leading organisational strategy, operations, processes, and teams.
• What do I also do well? Development (no-code/low-code), analysis, technical design, and problem-solving.
• How do I think best? By workshopping with others to clarify, articulate and connect concepts.
• How do I like to work? By being clear upfront about the purpose and direction of work, but being prepared to re-evaluate and change course while we’re underway. I’m enthusiastic but usually measured, with fairly high quality expectations.
• Who would I work best with? I’d love to talk if we have complementary and compatible objectives, skills, working styles, and personalities. If you don’t know me yet, perhaps you’ll have seen a glimpse of me in this article.

Until recently, too often I used to define myself by my work (even if I often found it hard to explain my roles - the generalist’s curse). This has changed for the better in these last few years, as my focus has moved more towards family matters - which of course are ultimately more important. I hope I don’t revert when my career regains shape!

This article was originally going to be a fairly factual update and career-focused view of my plans - it’s turned into something a little more reflective, personal, and honest (and longer). But I'm happy with how it turned out, and hope you are too. Let me know below!

I plan to do more writing here - some like this, some wandering in different directions. I’d be happy if you want to subscribe (for free) and come along for the ride.

Until next time!