From the course: Marci Alboher on Pursuing an Encore Career Instead of Retirement

Making a living

From the course: Marci Alboher on Pursuing an Encore Career Instead of Retirement

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Making a living

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- So you're on board, you want to work longer, you want to have an impact and make a difference in the world, but you're probably wondering how am I going to make a living doing this kind of thing? So where are these jobs, right? Where are these jobs that both matter and have meaning but also deliver a paycheck? So they're actually in many, many different places. So the natural and the obvious is to think about the nonprofit sector, of course, which we've been talking about. And the nonprofit sector is enormous and growing. It's schools, it's hospitals, it's arts organizations, it's any organization that's working on solving a social problem. And inside those organizations are all the kinds of roles that exist in the for-profit sector. So you have human resources and you have marketing and finance and IT. So if you're coming from the private sector, many of those skills are replicated in the nonprofit sector. So that's one area. But the nonprofit sector is not the only place where meaningful work that pays is happening. It happens in all kinds of companies. It happens in solar companies that are working to improve the environment or companies that are working to cure disease. So don't confine yourself to thinking that doing good is only happening in the nonprofit sector. It happens in government. It also happens through entrepreneurship and building small businesses or consulting practices or social ventures that are things you create on your own to solve issues that you care about or to work and serve client populations that you're interested in working with. And finally I want to mention my favorite approach, the slash approach, which is you may be doing more than one thing at a time and for some periods it may be that your highest potential for earning and income is not the place where you're doing the biggest social impact work that appeals to you at the moment. So you might find that you keep your current job and you get really involved in activism or volunteering or serve on a board. And it's also possible that one of those things that you're doing on the side could eventually become your encore. So now we've talked about a few of the different ways this can play out. It's also handy to know that you can do some salary research using some tools that are just, that make this stuff very easy. LinkedIn has its own salary insights tool which is very easy to use. And they will look at your own title and help you find what comparable titles are making in various sectors. So it's a great way. You could even plug in different roles and see what the average salaries look like in different cities where you're interested in living. So that's really handy. Glassdoor is another web tool that works where people anonymously feed in their salaries. So if you're working with an organization that's big enough that people might have contributed to the database you can find that in Glassdoor. But really, the easiest way to find out about salary is to start talking to people you trust and being open with them about what you earn and them being open with you about what they earn. There's a lot of opportunity for equity if we all start talking a little more honestly about salaries and how we really make a living and support ourselves. So it's a habit I try to encourage people to use.

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