Some great advice here! I'm thankfully retired from climbing a career ladder, and I was never in the corporate world.


I worked in some aspect of graphic or web design for most of my career and I was never interested in managing.


Having said that, I know what it's like to have the rug yanked out from under you at an advanced age. I got laid off from a tiny edtech startup at age 60, a woman in a tech-adjacent field looking for a job. It took me more than a year to get the job I retired from. I had several screening interviews and even a few onsite, but as soon as they realized my age, I was eliminated from consideration, with flimsy excuses about insufficient experience in XYZ. Then thanks to LinkedIn, I found they hired someone just out of school for that same position. (Because I went back to school for design in my late 30s, my resume gave the impression I was about 15 years younger).

I was astonished to see the incredibly low quality of "tech recruiters" out there. I wrote a long piece on that.

I've also written a long piece for UX Collective giving career advice to designers, which is similar to one of your points: figure out early on what excites you and make that your niche. Then target the companies that do that kind of work.

Anyway, thanks for this piece and good luck in the hunt.