This paper is an examination of the phenomenon of the midlife crisis and its effects on career planning and career change. In the course of life, individuals confront a series of challenges that help to shape personality and determine responses to problems, issues, and life stages. Psychologists have focused more attention on the developmental stages of childhood, but many researchers have come to believe that personality continues to be shaped significantly throughout life. The passage into midlife, when the individual begins to realize his or her limitations and mortality, can present the individual with one of life's most dramatic crises, and this drama is often manifested in the urge to pursue a new career as part of an overall desire to implement sweeping change in the direction of his or her life choices. Change can be beneficial when it consists of reevaluation and reaffirmation, but midlife can also be a dangerous time for the individual unable to find real meaning and purpose in his or her life and work. Midlife career change often provides an intriguing barometer of the individual's ability to benefit from the challenges that the onset of midlife can present.
Gail Sheehy's book, Passages, raised public awareness of the concept of the midlife crisis, an important point in individual development which she describes:
As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we become susceptible to the idea of our own perishability . . . We are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties. Nor are we anticipating a major upheaval of the roles and rules that may have comfortably defined us in the first half of our life, but that must be reordered around a core of strongly felt personal values in the second (6).
Reaching what most expect...