Interacting with various grandparents of friends and family over the past few months, it’s become apparent that there aren’t many resources easily available to help Seniors/Grandparents successfully negotiate the twin challenges of mastering Internet tools while extending or beginning a new career cycle – working at home. I’ll call this demographic “Career at Home Seniors” (CAHS) or “Career at Home Grandparents” (CAHG). CAHS seems more inclusive, though doesn’t necessarily include topics, opportunities or the help that may come from your children. But I’ll include it.

Why is this important? Many reasons, ranging from the economy forcing Seniors to re-initialize careers and jobs, the incredible potential for at-home income-producing opportunities made possible via Internet tools and social media, and simply the desire of many Seniors to continue “giving back” or at least leveraging lifelong skills and experience for the good of their community, family and business networks. All the communications, education and community advantages the Internet provides Seniors aren’t a new concept – but the real need, and real opportunities, to forge a new or extended career at home by leveraging Internet new media capabilities is a relatively unexplored topic.

All over the Internet are loads of “opportunities”, scams and entreaties to engage Seniors in all kinds of “Work at Home” activities (i.e. WAHS; “Work at Home Seniors”)…but most are day-to-day jobs or taskings, with little equity-building potential (in terms of income or knowledge) and short shrift given to leveraging and creating value out of past career experience and long-term relationships. Typical Work at Home Senior opportunities do not yield lasting value for Seniors, or their partners and families.

To truly create or extend a real career at home, as someone who may have retired from the daily grind, and is looking for low-impact but highly intellectual pursuits, the first step is not an online job search, or even an online “Web 2.0” training course. It’s really what we call a “knowledge management” exercise…Basically, if you were to categorize the kinds of subjects you know most about, the type of people and organizations with whom you’ve got relationships, and the specific skills you’re good at on the Internet, what would these be? For example (thinking about a particular family member):

Topics:
– Retail Marketing
– Salesforce Effectiveness and Management
– Merchandise Management
– Retail Business Planning
– Retail Buying Process

Relationships:
– Retail Buyer’s network, large companies (like JC Penney)
– Retail Chain Managers, regional
– Retail Entrepreneurs
– Business School Alumni and families

Skills:
– Outlines and Plans
– Business Models
– Research
– Speaking and Oral Presentation

With this sort of inventory (this particular person is what you’d called an “untapped reservoir of potential”), it’s not too hard to fashion a strategy for “packaging” these knowledge assets and skills, and creating a marketable product online (either to sell or to contribute to another business) as a career-extending opportunity. It always helps, though, for Seniors to align themselves with, or take advantage of, persons who understand Internet Marketing and Social Media – both for training and exposure of their “packaged intellectual assets”.

With the right initiative and enthusiasm (extremely important!), a little knowledge management structure, and some help with Internet media tools – it’s not too hard to imagine thousands of Career at Home Seniors flowering every day on the Internet.

Send us some information about your background (or that of your own grandparent) – we can help provide some structure and advice to the senior career at home pursuit.