Changing career can feel like starting again. After years building experience, confidence and professional credibility, moving into an entirely different industry can look suspiciously like going back to square one.
But perhaps that is the wrong way to see it. Recent Careershifters research found that 48% of people never or rarely feel fulfilled by their work. Poor work-life balance or wellbeing motivated 41% to consider change, while 40% cited a mismatch with their values or sense of purpose.
Here, Kevin Thackrah, Director of Petpals, discusses why a second career can be a progression rather than a fresh start and why pet care could offer the flexibility to build something around your next chapter.
Know what you are moving towards
“I want to get out of my current job” might start a career search, but it is not enough to choose the right destination.
Perhaps you want greater control over your week, less time behind a desk or the opportunity to build something of your own. Maybe you want to manage a team, work outdoors or feel more connected to your local community.
Pet care can accommodate very different ambitions. Some franchisees want to remain hands-on with animals and build a manageable local client base. Others recruit teams, increase capacity and gradually spend more time leading the business.
Neither route is inherently better. What matters is understanding what success looks like to you before choosing the opportunity.
Your experience comes with you
One of the advantages of changing career later in life is that you already know far more about how you work best and where your strengths lie.
At Petpals, we have welcomed franchisees from childcare, television, policing, the Armed Forces, hospitality and acting. Those careers may seem unrelated to pet care, but the skills developed within them often translate surprisingly well. Communication, organisation, resilience, leadership and customer service all matter when you are running a local business.
Rather than concentrating solely on what you do not know about a new sector, consider what you already bring to it. Then ask whether the franchise has the training, systems and ongoing support to fill the gaps.
Think beyond launch day
It is easy to become focused on making the initial career change, but I think there is a more useful question: will the opportunity still suit you in five or 10 years?
You might initially enjoy spending most of your time outdoors delivering pet care yourself. As the business grows, however, you may want to recruit a team and spend more time managing people, developing customer relationships or driving growth.
That ability to evolve is worth investigating in any franchise. Speak to existing franchisees and ask how their role has changed since launch. A good second career should suit the person you are today while giving you room to become the business owner you might want to be tomorrow.
Flexibility does not mean a lack of ambition
Pet care is sometimes labelled a lifestyle business, but I think that can undersell what people build.
For one franchisee, success might mean a smaller operation that provides greater autonomy and a working life they enjoy. Another might want to employ a substantial team and develop a much larger local business. Flexibility is having the choice between those paths.
Working with animals might be the attraction, but this remains business ownership. There are customers to manage, marketing decisions to make, finances to understand and, potentially, employees to lead. How far you take the opportunity will depend on what you want to build and the effort you put into it.
Perhaps that is the most useful way to think about a second career. You are not discarding everything that came before. You are combining years of professional and life experience with new training and a clearer understanding of what you want from work.
For the right person, pet care can provide the opportunity to do exactly that. And when people make that change and remain in the sector for decades, it is a useful reminder that a second career can sometimes become the longest chapter of all.
