The “What Do I Do With The Last 10 Years Of My Career?” Question

Claire CampionMay 14, 2026

Group of accomplished professionals in their 50s and 60s - planning the last 10 years of your career

The first time a client asked me that question out loud, she was 54, three promotions deep into a job that no longer fit, and staring at a calendar that suddenly felt much shorter than she’d expected. She didn’t want to retire. She didn’t want to keep grinding. She wanted to know what the last part of a long career was actually for.

I hear some version of this question almost every week now. Sometimes it sounds like, “What do I do with the last 10 years of my career?” Sometimes it’s, “Is it too late to do something different?” Sometimes it’s, “Do I just hang on, or do I try one more thing?” The wording shifts. The underlying question is the same. I have a finite runway left. How do I want to spend it?

If you’re sitting with this question right now, I want to be clear about one thing before we go any further: this is not a small question, and you are not late to ask it. Most people I work with arrive here in their late 40s or 50s, exactly when the calendar starts feeling real and the old playbook starts feeling thin. If you’d like to see how I think about the timing piece specifically, I wrote about it in How Do I Know It’s Time For A Career Change. This article is about what comes after that decision: how to actually use the runway you have left.

Table of Contents

Why The Last 10 Years Of Your Career Feel Different From The First 30

The first three decades of a career run on a fairly standard script. You build skills, you climb, you take on more responsibility, you optimize for income and title, you reach the level you set out to reach (or you don’t), and then somewhere around 50 the script runs out. Nobody hands you a new one.

Part of what makes the last decade feel different is that the runway is actually shorter than the runway most of us were trained to plan for. A person retiring at 65 in the U.S. today can expect to live close to two more decades [1], which means the work years between 55 and 65 carry real weight. They are not filler. They are the last full chapter of paid working life for most people, and they happen to overlap with the years where energy, perspective, and accumulated skill are at their peak.

The career arc I learned to plan for, education then work then retirement, doesn’t fit the lifespan most of my clients are actually living. The version that fits is closer to a multi-stage life [2] with several distinct chapters and clear transitions between them, an idea Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott have written about extensively. The last 10 years of a career is one of those chapters, and it deserves its own intentional design. [3]

Why This Question Usually Arrives Sooner Than You Expect

Most of my clients don’t wake up at 60 asking what to do with their final decade. They wake up at 50, sometimes 48, with a quiet but persistent feeling that something is shifting. By the time the question reaches my office out loud, most of them have been turning it over privately for a year or two. That tracks with what the encore career research at CoGenerate has reported: people who eventually make meaningful late-career transitions tend to start thinking about them around age 50, with the move itself taking about 18 months. The thinking starts well before the action.

In my work, I see the question arrive through three doors.

The first door is burnout, where the body finally votes against another year of the same intensity.

The second door is loss of meaning, where the work still pays well but no longer connects to anything you care about.

The third door is an external trigger, often a layoff, a restructuring, or the realization that the next promotion isn’t coming.

Any of these can be the moment a capable, accomplished woman starts asking what the rest of this is for.

If the question is showing up for you because of a layoff or a restructure, the timing pressure can make this feel like a crisis instead of an inquiry. It usually isn’t. A late-career layoff is more often a forced pause that creates space for a question you were going to need to answer anyway.

If any of those three doors is the one you’ve walked through, a focused conversation can help you separate the noise from the real signal.

Talk Through Where You Are

The Three Patterns I See When Someone Asks “What Do I Do With The Last 10 Years Of My Career?”

After a few hundred of these conversations, I’ve stopped pretending there’s one right answer. There are three patterns, and most people fit cleanly into one of them once they look honestly at what they want.

The Coast: Stay, but stop optimizing for growth

The coast is the choice to stay where you are, do good work, and stop trying to climb. You stop volunteering for the stretch project. You stop chasing the next title. You let the role be the role and reclaim the energy you’d been spending on advancement.

This is the most underrated of the three.

There’s a quiet bias in our culture against “just” doing your job, but for someone who has already built strong financial footing and just wants to protect their evenings, weekends, and health for a decade, the coast is a perfectly legitimate strategy.

The Climb: One more big push, on your terms

The climb is the choice to spend the last decade going for one specific thing you haven’t done yet. The C-suite role. The board seat. The book. The startup. The income peak that finally makes the math work for the rest of your life.

The climb works when there’s a clear, specific target and a clear reason it matters to you.

It does not work when it’s just inertia dressed up as ambition.

The clearest sign that a climb is healthy is that you can name the thing you’re climbing toward and the year you’d like to reach it.

The clearest sign it’s not healthy is that the answer to “why this?” is some version of “because I always have.”

The Pivot: Use the runway for something genuinely different

The pivot is the choice to spend the last decade doing different work than you did in the first three. Sometimes that’s a true encore career in a new field, often in education, healthcare, or social impact, which is where roughly 25 million Americans aged 50 to 70 [4, 7] have said they want to direct their next chapter. Sometimes the pivot is smaller, like moving from the corporate version of your skill set to the consulting or fractional version. Sometimes it’s a true reinvention. [4]

The pivot is what most people are romanticizing when they ask this question, and it’s also the most demanding of the three.

It usually requires real skill-building, real network-building, and a year or two of lower income while the new thing takes root. I wrote a full breakdown of the moving parts in How to Make a Mid-Career Change, and most of that mechanics applies to a late-career pivot as well, with one important exception I’ll cover below.

How To Decide Which Pattern Fits You

When someone arrives in my coaching practice asking which of the three to pick, I almost never answer the question directly. Instead, I ask a smaller one: What would you regret more in 10 years, having done this or not having done it?

That single question does more clarifying work than any assessment I’ve ever used. People at the end of their lives almost never regret leaving a job that drained them. They regret staying. The palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware put “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” second on her list of the most common regrets of the dying [9], behind only the regret of not having lived a life true to oneself. That’s worth holding next to whatever decision you’re sitting with. [10]

If the regret answer is unclear, the next question I ask is about energy. After 30 years of paid work, you know the difference between a Sunday-night feeling that comes from a hard week and a Sunday-night feeling that comes from being in the wrong place. If your current role consistently produces the second kind, the coast is unlikely to be the right pattern, even if it looks like the safest one.

The third question is about identity. A surprising number of capable women I work with realize they have been quietly identifying with their job title for so long that the thought of doing anything smaller, different, or less prestigious feels destabilizing. That’s not a reason to keep doing it. It’s a signal that part of the work of this decade is going to be untangling who you are from what your business card says.

The Money Question Inside The Question

Whichever pattern you pick, there is a financial question inside it that most people avoid until far too late. The honest version of “What do I do with the last 10 years of my career?” is “What do I do with the last 10 years of my career, given the savings I have, the lifestyle I want, and the years I expect to live after I stop?”

A late-career pivot, in particular, often pays less, at least initially. In my client work I see this consistently, and the same pattern shows up at scale in Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis [6]: workers who change careers later in life tend to move into roles that pay less and offer fewer benefits, though those roles often offer more flexibility and less stress. That trade-off can be the right one. It cannot be a surprise.

I’m not a financial advisor and I won’t pretend to be. But I will tell you that I won’t take a client through a pivot decision without making sure they’ve at least had the financial-runway conversation with someone qualified, ideally before the resignation letter goes out. The pivot is a much better experience when it’s a choice rather than a forced landing.

How To Avoid The Two Most Common Late-Career Regrets

After enough of these conversations, two regrets show up over and over in clients who waited too long to ask the question.

The first regret is staying in a role that was draining them for fear that nothing else would have them. Almost every time, the next role did have them. The market underestimates older workers more than older workers underestimate themselves, but only barely. Meaningful work is one of the few categories where older workers are increasingly being courted, not pushed out, and roughly 90% of workers over 50 in AARP’s research [13] said a job must offer meaningful work before they’d take it.

The second regret is treating the last decade like the first one and burning the runway on goals that mattered to a younger version of themselves. The promotion you wanted at 32 is not necessarily the promotion you want at 56. One of the harder pieces of late-career work is letting yourself want different things now without treating that as a betrayal of the person who built the career in the first place.

If you’d like a thinking partner to make sure your last decade isn’t a repeat of your first, I can help with that.

Plan The Next Chapter With Me

A Simple Framework I Use With Clients (The Four-Corner Check)

When a client and I are trying to choose between coasting, climbing, and pivoting, I run a quick four-corner check on the option they’re leaning toward. It borrows from the Japanese concept of ikigai, which roughly translates to “a reason for being” and is often described as the overlap of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

I ask four questions about the option in front of us:

Does this work draw on something I’m genuinely good at, not just something I’ve been doing for a long time?

Does this work connect to something I actually care about now, not something I cared about at 35?

Does this work meet a real demand someone is willing to pay for, at a price I can live on?

And does this work fit the version of life I want to be living for the next decade, including the non-work parts?

A solid yes in all four corners is rare and usually means you’ve found something worth pursuing. Two yeses and two maybes usually means a pivot is possible but needs more design. A pattern of “I’m good at it and I get paid for it, but the other two corners are empty” almost always points toward a coast or a pivot, not a climb. People who climb hardest in the last decade tend to be the ones with strong yeses in the care and world needs corners, not just the paid one.

When To Start Asking The Question

If you’re under 45, you can probably set this question down. Not because it isn’t important, but because the answer changes a lot between now and then, and locking in too early tends to produce decisions that don’t survive contact with your actual 50-year-old self.

If you’re between 45 and 55, this is the right window. Long enough out that you can plan, build, and reposition without panic. Close enough in that the question is real and the runway is visible. Most of my best client work happens in this window.

If you’re past 55 and you’ve never asked this question seriously, please don’t read that as bad news. Many of the most satisfying late-career stories I’ve watched up close started after the person had already crossed the line they’d assumed was the deadline. The 27% of workers who change occupations between their early 50s and late 60s, tracked in research from the Urban Institute [8], are not unusual. They’re the quiet majority of people who did something with the last 10 years of their career other than wait it out. [6]

What I’d Want You To Walk Away With

If I could put one thing in your pocket from this article, it would be this: the last 10 years of your career belong to you, and they are big enough to hold a real decision. They are not a postscript. They are not a holding pattern between now and retirement. They are a chapter, and you get to write it.

Whether that means coasting on purpose, climbing one last hill, or pivoting into something genuinely different, the worst version of this decade is the one where you don’t choose. The best version is the one where you do, and where the choice fits the woman you actually are now, not the one you were when you first picked this path.

If you’re sitting with this question and want a partner in the thinking, that’s exactly the conversation I do best in one-to-one coaching. When you’re ready, you can book a complimentary intro call here and we’ll talk through where you are.

When you’re ready to write the chapter on purpose instead of by default, this is where we start.

Book A Complimentary Intro Call

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it too late to start a new career in my late 50s?

In my experience, no. The data agrees. Roughly a quarter of workers who were employed full time in their early 50s are in a different occupation by their late 60s, and many of the most satisfying career transitions I’ve coached happened in someone’s late 50s or early 60s. The bigger risk at this age isn’t being too late, it’s underestimating what you bring to the table. [6]

How do I know if I should pivot or just coast for the last 10 years?

The fastest way I know is to ask which choice you’d regret more in a decade. If the thought of not pivoting produces more regret than the thought of pivoting, you have your answer, and the work becomes designing the pivot well. If coasting feels like relief rather than resignation, that’s also a valid answer, and the work becomes protecting the boundaries that make the coast worth it. [9]

What if I don’t know what I want to do for the last 10 years of my career?

Most people don’t, at first. Clarity in late-career planning rarely arrives as a clean answer. It usually arrives as a series of smaller “yes, more of this” and “no, less of that” signals over a few months. The work is to start collecting those signals on purpose instead of waiting for a single revelation.

Will I have to take a pay cut to change careers in my 50s?

Often, yes, at least initially. Workers who change careers later in life tend to move into roles that pay less than their previous ones in the short term, though they often offer more flexibility and less stress. Whether that trade is right for you depends on your savings, your lifestyle, and how much the new work matters to you. This is the conversation I always recommend having with a financial professional before any pivot becomes real. [6]

How long does a late-career transition usually take?

In my practice, I tell clients to plan for somewhere between 12 and 24 months from “I think I want something different” to “I’m doing the different thing.” That tracks with the encore career research, which puts the average transition at about 18 months. Faster than that and you’re often skipping important design work. Slower than that and you may be stalling. [4]

What’s the biggest mistake people make when planning the last decade of their career?

The biggest mistake I see is treating the last decade like the first one. The first three decades reward optimizing for advancement. The last decade rewards optimizing for fit, energy, and meaning. People who try to apply the old playbook to the new chapter usually end up exhausted and still asking the same question five years later.

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