Jobs for Over 50 Workers & Seniors

Finding a job when your Over 50 has become harder with the recent downturn in the economy, not that it wasn’t already hard! About Seniors Jobs for Over 50 Workers & Seniors site is aimed at giving helpful tips and advise to find a job you want!

On our Casual Jobs for Travellers page, we outline ways to Earn money on the road while you travel, which can come in handy for those looking to make their way around this great southern land we call Australia.

Bed and Breakfast

There are thousands of Bed and Breakfast properties right across Australia,
NZ and elsewhere throughout the world and most of these businesses are small to medium enterprises, owned and operated by couples, with many of them situated in very desirable locations.

As with most small business, many of the operators have difficulty in finding the “right type” of relief managers to look after their businesses in order to take a break, resulting in people not taking breaks, or shutting down their business to enable them to do so.  Neither option is ideal, not for the owners nor the business. Find out more.

Your workplace rights

It may not feel like it, but things are moving in the right direction when it comes to rights for mature age workers.

There is no statutory retirement age in Australia.

An important piece of legislation of direct benefit to older workers was quietly introduced late in 2008. This relates to the Age Discrimination Act, ACT 2004 and effectively widens the Act by the removal of the ‘dominant reason’ test. This means that a person need only show that their age was one of the reasons they were discriminated against. This will harmonise the Act with other federal unlawful discrimination laws. It will hopefully also mean that job applicants will no longer have to sing and dance to prove that they can fit in with a youthful workplace culture.

There are many other safeguards for older workers which cover getting a job, terms and conditions, training, promotion, dismissal and redundancy although voluntary work and domestic duties in private households are not as well protected. Fairer legislation is a help, but it can’t change society’s attitudes overnight. 

Senior Australian of the Year - Maggie Beer

Between the quince paste and the cameras, Sue Williams catches up with the incredibly busy Maggie Beer.

She runs a flourishing food business with 60 staff, is co-star of a TV show and has one best-seller out and another book set to hit the market in November. And yes, she still loves to cook up a storm every day, often for her whole extended family and great gaggles of friends. 

The popular image of Maggie Beer, Australia’s modern-day patron saint of good food, is of a warm earth mother, deftly combining the myriad ingredients of her hectic life with ease and flair, and still serenely serving up a wonderfully wholesome and delicious meal each night. But, the reality isn’t quite there.

We’ve now changed the date, and time, of this interview five times because Maggie’s so busy, her timetable is so crammed and she’s plainly over-stretched. One appointment spills into the next, another folds when an unfinished, overdue project needs more urgent attention, and another simply curdles in the heat. “I just have so much on,” says Maggie, apologetically.
Friends are used to it. One, on being served a sumptuous lunch – just on dusk – laughs affectionately. “It’s always like that around here,” he says, gesturing at Maggie’s huge open-plan kitchen in her home in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, filled with the chatter of hungry guests. “That’s her life.”

In a world of careful measurements and exact timings, such mayhem can prove a dash unsettling. After all, her great mate, fellow celebrity cook Stephanie Alexander, is the very model of carefully cultivated precision. But here, in Maggie’s kitchen, testing recipes for her books and writing stories about them is sandwiched between an early-morning hunting and gathering trip to the local Barossa Markets, refining one of the flavours of the ice cream she produces, slow-roasting duck with onion, garlic, cumquat and figs for a lunch for 10, and fielding numerous calls – and this is Saturday.

The overall impression is of a woman completely possessed, living life in a sticky frenzy of food, sauces and relishes. “But I do love it,” says Maggie, 63. “I just have to remember sometimes that I’m no longer 45, and now and then something has to give.” She’s recently had a bout of flu, for instance, and it’s taken her much longer than usual to get over it. “But I love what I do, and my passion for it invigorates me and keeps me going.”
It’s hard to resist suggesting that convenience foods, the well-publicised bêtes noires of a life spent extolling the merits of good home-cooked meals of fresh produce every day, could save a little time in her frantic schedule. But she won’t take the bait. 

“We’re all time-poor,” she responds. “No-one has enough time. The trick is to be organised, for example, by picking up fresh produce on the way back from work, visiting your local farmers’ market, and keeping some good pasta and olive oil in the cupboard and some fish in the freezer. That way, there’s never an excuse for not having good food.”
It’s now 35 years since Maggie, then working in citizenship law, and husband Colin bought a pheasant farm in the Barossa, an hour’s drive north-east of Adelaide. She turned all her energy to the pheasants … until the couple discovered that no-one knew how to cook them, so wouldn’t buy them, either.

Instead, Maggie learnt to cook them herself, started a farm shop and soon established herself as a talented cook with a successful restaurant, then as a vigneron and, finally, as a manufacturer of fine foods. That food business now produces more than 30 different items, from burnt fig jam to Sangiovese verjuice to pheasant and porcini terrine, exporting to the UK, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and the US. In addition, The Cook and the Chef, the TV program in which Maggie is cook to Simon Bryant’s chef, is now in its third year on ABC TV, while her cookbook released late last year, Maggie’s Harvest, is still selling strongly.

Maggie is keenly aware that she’s privileged to be surrounded on all sides by good food: Colin, 65, is now CEO of the food business and their two daughters, Saskia, 34, and Ellie, 32, have a catering operation together, with Saskia also producing organic Barossa chicken and milk-fed lambs. And she’s worried for those people who aren’t as fortunate as she is.
“You just can’t overestimate the importance of food in our lives,” she says. “It’s about good nutrition, and giving us the vitality to really seize life, but it’s also about sharing the table with family and friends. Too often people say they don’t have the time to prepare proper meals, or the money. But anyone can, really – you just have to plan ahead.”

She believes that everyone could save both time and money by buying and cooking fresh food. “A lot of people spend more time queuing at supermarket checkouts for convenience foods than it would take to prepare meals with fresh produce,” she says. “As for the expense, if you buy fruit and vegetables in season, then you’re buying them at their very best and cheapest and, personally, I prefer cheaper cuts of meat, like shoulder or oxtail or neck. They’re the sweetest pieces you’ll find.”
If only people weren’t so fearful of food, she laments – obsessing about calories and fat content and conflicting reports of what’s good and bad, when everything in moderation is the real secret of healthy eating. And if only they weren’t so afraid of the kitchen, and nervous about making mistakes.

It’s fine to muck up, she insists – that’s the way we learn. And simple dishes are often just as good as complicated ones. Most weekdays, she’s happy to eat just a piece of grilled fish or chicken with vegetables or salad, and even when making her own recipes, she’ll sometimes come unstuck.

“I’ll often make mistakes and forget to put the salt in something or burn food,” she admits, laughing. “I’m a very haphazard cook, I’m very unstructured and I’ve never been formally trained.
“In many ways, I’m the very antithesis of the celebrity chef trend. While I respect chefs, and have learnt a lot from them, it’s my role, as a cook, to make people feel comfortable in the kitchen.”

She’s always happy to call a spade a spade, is eager to demystify cooking by using plain, simple language – and ingredients – and to go through recipes, step-by-step. “I like to encourage people to have a go,” she says. “Cooking should be fun, and I hope I can help people enjoy the experience.”

Starting early is always best, however. While she was taught by her dad, Ron, to cook after his kitchenware business failed, and he and Maggie’s mum, Doreen, started cooking in RSL clubs, she taught her own daughters early, and now enjoys the kitchen with her grandchildren, Max, about to turn 11, Zoe, 11, Lily, nine, and Rory, four. Six-month-old Ben will join them when he’s old enough.

The fact that the whole family shares a similar philosophy about the importance of good food means she never worries about anything as organised as a succession plan. “I don’t plan to retire for at least another 20 years,” she says, although she longs to have time one day to sculpt, draw and play the piano.
“By then, my grandchildren will have grown up and become members of the board. In a business like this, it’s always difficult to work out what will happen. But why would I want to give it up? I’m having far too much fun.”

MORE

Maggie’s latest book is Maggie’s Harvest (Penguin, RRP $125), featuring more than 350 of her signature recipes and memories of inspiring meals with family and friends.
You can watch episodes of The Cook and the Chef online at www.abc.net.au/tv/cookandchef and purchase DVDs of the series.
Look for the Maggie Beer range of produce at your favourite food store, or order direct.
Ph (08) 8562 4477
Web www.maggiebeer.com.au

Stepping out of full-time work

You thought retirement would be bliss, but it’s more like hell. Hugh Davies explains how to handle (or prevent) this predicament.

Q. It is six months since I have retired, and I have just found myself sharpening the knives for the third time this month. There has got to be more to retirement than this!

A. There is no question that being an employed or self-employed person in regular work fills in a large part of how most individuals define themselves. As Gordon Livingston observes in Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (Hachette Australia 2009): “We are not what we think, or what we say or how we feel, we are what we do” – and an awful lot of our ‘doing’ occurs at work. People who step out of work – whether involuntarily, or voluntarily – have a lot to think about and do to replace both the time spent at work, and the impact it has on how they view themselves.

Work provides structure to most days, it is associated with wide rather than narrow circles of relationships, it is usually associated with doing something constructive and providing meaning or validation at some level. Work exercises both intellectual and social skills. Work for many people is a form of self-expression and, providing the stress and effort sometimes involved are reasonable, work often stretches us and helps us grow capabilities and insights. Full-time work usually delivers income, too.
Working full-time has its disadvantages, of course.

But I think that ripping all these validating and stretching things away, without taking a great deal of care to replace them, is for some people fairly catastrophic. Stepping out of work and doing something else – whether by choice or not – is a much bigger transition than many acknowledge. The dream of “doing something for me”, of “finding new forms of expression” and “taking a long break from the grind” is often a bit illusory – and more than a few people find themselves looking for something constructive to do, something much better than sharpening the knives for the third time in a month!

The answer is not necessarily to stay at work in the old job, but it is to prepare for a transition, and to start building the activities which will replace work – well ahead of making this change, if you can. And if the retirement is brought upon you with little notice, then set about finding some new ‘work’ – acknowledging that it may be different from the past, but will be most likely just as important in helping you continue to feel fulfilled. For many, the dream of endless rounds of golf and the ‘relaxation’ of retirement turn out to be insufficient for an enduring sense of fulfilment.

Ideally your new working life, post-regular employment, will engage talents and interests built up in the years before this change. Generally, the past is a good guide to the future. Look through your achievements and the things you were doing when you felt really good about yourself.  Then use this thinking both to set directions and to guide your investigations of how to bring new work into being. Think of transitions that build on your strengths and knowledge, rather than ones which would need quite radical redefinition.

This is not to say that long-cherished aims to write a book or travel, for example, should be abandoned. But for most people, these are best brought about as adventures to be blended in with other things, rather than seen as the absolute total of your new working life.

Finally, identifying and capturing new work, including and perhaps especially a portfolio of activities, takes time and often requires skills long since neglected (or even new skills). Take time, seek advice and expect this new journey to take quite a while to crystallise.

What ‘new work’?

The ‘new work’ taken up as an alternative to full-time regular employment may not be paid work – or it may be a portfolio of activities, some paid and some unpaid, perhaps. Here are some ideas.
You might consider such things as consulting, teaching, returning to being a student, starting a new business, joining someone else in a business or supporting your partner in a new business, being an ‘angel’ investor, becoming a volunteer or engaging at some other level in a community organisation.
The new work may also entail helping out raising the grandchildren; travelling with a focus on learning new things; writing a book, a play, or a television or film script; working in an offshore aid organisation or as a paid consultant in a development bank. Another popular interim career is leading a home renovation – but you could take this into property development: buying and restoring houses, for example.

MORE

Hugh Davies is the managing director of Macfarlan Lane – a business offering career transition and career development services to organisational clients. The company’s website includes a special section with a range of downloadable articles on ‘Career changes for people in mid to late careers’.
Ph 1300 852 788
Web www.macfarlanlane.com.au
Email
First published in YOURLifeChoices

Click here to download the PDF version of this article.

Put your education to good use

Having studied for years and then gained experience in your chosen field, it seems a shame to let all that knowledge go to waste. There may be ways to use your skills to earn money.

Tutoring
You may not have thought about earning money from passing on the knowledge and skills that you have acquired over the years but this can be a lucrative exercise if you know how.

There is a growing call for tutors and whether you can assist younger children, high school students or even those who need a little extra help with university course work, mentoring a student can be more than just financially rewarding.  You can simply pop ads in the local press, community notice boards and contact locals schools or you can apply for actual jobs via agencies.  Some agencies do charge for registering so it’s worthwhile checking if you get your money back if no work is forthcoming.

Due to changes in the law, you may also need a Working With Children Check (in Victoria, there will be similar in other states) and it’s worthwhile getting this done before you start looking for work.

Find out how to be a tutor.

Thesis editing
By the time a student has come to the end of writing a thesis, the last thing they want to undertake is the final editing. Students who do not have English as a first language, may also struggle with this process.  If you have an excellent grasp of grammar and an understanding of editing processes, then you can make money by helping out with this process.

There are agencies who carry out this work for a fee and you may consider registering with one of these if you have the necessary academic qualifications.  However, sometimes all that is needed is an understanding of the written word.  If you think that you have the necessary skills to be able to assist students, then you should contact your local college or university and ask to be put on their list of potential thesis editors or post a notice on the student notice boards offering your services.

Find contact details of universities in your area, visit Universities Australia .

Typing and transcription services
If you didn’t quite reach the dizzy heights of academia but are a wiz with a typewriter, then why not consider offering your secretarial services to those less practiced.

There are many people who would love to write a book, or specialist paper but simply lack keyboard skills.  An ad in your local paper, library or college will let people know you’re ready, willing and able

IT Help Desk support

If you have an understanding of the internet you can work from home offering Help Desk technical support to hotel guests having difficulty connecting through our system. Training will be given but a good basic understanding of internet connectivity is required.  We support guests throughout Australian hotels. It doesn’t matter where you are located as calls are diverted to you.

You would be ‘on-call’ to answer guest support calls directed to your home number, from 9am to 7pm on Wednesday and Saturday each week , for which you would be paid a retainer. In addition you would be on call to act as call overflow back up from 6 pm to 10pm, 2 evenings a week. Payment for overflow back up is generally on a per call basis.

Help Desk call levels generally allow you your own time when on call, but availability to take the calls as they come in and to troubleshoot from your own PC is vital.

Please contact us with your relevant experience, at

Older workers rock

Even the Federal Government is on the case to help companies see value in hiring older workers.

To understand the Government’s view on the value of older employees (great insight when you are in an interview and proving your worth) check out the website called Valuing Older Workers now!

Training opportunity

The TAP into Training (TAPiT) programme at Swinburne TAFE in Victoria assists unemployed over-45s and sole parents to find appropriate training opportunities, with a view to returning to the workforce. If you are eligible, Swinburne can help reduce the cost of the course, if not fully subsidise it.

Participants who are working less than 15 hours-a-week and who hold a health care card, can receive funding for most accredited TAFE courses – that is, the Government funded courses.

Course are offered from various campuses.The Croydon office serviced Croydon, Lilydale, Wantirna and Healesville campuses. The Prahran office services Prahran and Hawthorn campuses. For more information click here