Don’t retire – become a barrister instead

Ok, that’s probably not advice for everyone to follow but I was intrigued by this item in The Irish Times by Douglas Hyde who, after years of working as a town planner, decided to train as a barrister in his later 50s – a time in life when he says most of his peers were thinking about retirement. I guess I was interested partly because of having done a career change myself (though not at retirement age) pretty much in the opposite direction having started out in law.

The author describes his decision as follows: “I wanted to do something different, worthwhile and outside my comfort zone. Retirement, playing bad golf and volunteering an evening or two a week wouldn’t be enough. Reinvention as a practising barrister as well as golf and volunteering would be much better.”

The article was picked up in our alerts under the heading ‘age discrimination’ though in fact rather happily the author reports the complete opposite: “There is neither age discrimination against late entrants nor a compulsory retirement age for barristers. Work, life and learning go on.” Indeed they do.  How nice to report a good news story on age at work. We’ll see if we can find more as we approach the Christmas holidays.

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