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You’re tired. Your career is winding down. The younger people in the office have more energy, are more digitally savvy, and have been running circles around your Baby Boomer bummed out beefaroni buttocks. And the coronavirus has you flummoxed and bewildered and wondering if the world is ending.
Still, it’s time to act. This is your last chance, with the working world on pause, to re-skill and reinvent yourself, to come out on the other side worth something to someone. You can get ahead of the professional curve while the pandemic rolls on.
Return to school and take courses that are relevant and in demand in the workplace. That means you need to get a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a concentration in software programming.
Then you need to get a master’s in that. Then you need to build on that by getting a Ph.D. in data analytics. Every company in the world needs people who have butcher-knife-sharp data analytics critical thinking skills. And you need cybersecurity skills.
The business world is all about one thing now: Organization and manipulation of data so you can generate better insights from that data to make smarter business decisions to make more money so everybody can retire rich and happy.
Go back to high school and take Algebra I
If you didn’t take enough math classes in high school, you need to start there first. Go back to high school. Think of it as High School 2.0.
Enroll at your local high school and sign up for Algebra I. You will learn about how to do factoring (the FOIL method—first, outside, inside, last), and add together polynomials with lots of x’s and y’s mixed in.
After Algebra you will need to take Algebra II. This will get hard to understand and remain disciplined about. Homework assignments will get more difficult to finish and you won’t often have time because you’ll prefer to watch ESPN, which is showing re-runs of every sporting event that happened in the past thirty years because sports are on hold due to the global pandemic. Bag the documentaries.
To become a software programmer, you must crush Algebra I.
Once you master this – it will probably take you five-to-seven years – you need to take Calculus. You may have skipped this onerous and mind-twisting subject in high school and college because you didn’t want to think or work so hard because you were young and wanted to have fun instead.
But now – some 40 or so years later — you need to confront Calculus. It may take you several years before you even get to the point when you know what the point of Calculus is, but you must persist. No one becomes a computer software programmer without mastering Calculus.
Enroll in college and take Calculus again
After about 10 years, you may if you’re lucky and work your tail off wake up from that mathematical nightmare. Then enroll in college. There you will have to take Calculus again because the college won’t believe you really learned it in high school.
You will struggle with Calculus, but anyone who wants to make tons of money in the workforce these days as a software computer programmer needs to know what struggling feels like. Big payoffs begin with big problems to solve.
Overcome time constraints
Keep going. You will be 65 or 70 years old and getting more tired. Your joints will be sorer. You may have a few grandkids to compete with your study time. But you must move on. Don’t lose sight of your end game, which is to redefine yourself, to upskill everything about you, so you become more valuable to corporate employers.
Employers want computer software programmers and data analytics savants more than they want interpersonal relationships. This will remain true for the next 100 years.
A side benefit to this intellectual and professional odyssey is you will get written about on the Sammy Sportface — Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog as the hombre from the Brotherhood who went back to school to re-skill and become a computer software programmer because you wanted to make a lot of money so you could retire comfortably and be able to watch sports on a huge flat-screen TV in your retirement home.
Family and friends will talk about you
You will be able to share the news clips with your family and friends. They will be inspired by your story but will talk about you when you’re not around about why you are going back to school as a Baby Boomer to become a computer software programmer. But they will understand that you’re doing it for the sexy salary you would get paid by doing so.
They will try to talk you out of this unrealistic ambition. They will warn you you are being unrealistic to think employers would want to hire a 70-year-old computer software programmer when they can choose among hundreds of thousands in their twenties and thirties who are healthier and are lower risks for eating away at their health insurance costs and thereby eating into their profits and irking off Wall Street investors.
But you will have none of it. As a card-carrying member of the Baby Brother Brotherhood, you must abide by your oath to ensure your best years are in front of you. Your calling is to call on your strengths to achieve what no one believes you can, to do unthinkable things, to pursue unconventional passions because there is no rule that says a 70-year-old computer software programmer/data analytics expert can’t get the job done well.
You will prove you have value. You will have up-skilled as a sign of maturity and audacity. You will have broken the mold.
And you will make yourself very, very rich.
And you will have a great, high-resolution flat screen in your retirement room.
The Baby Boomer Brotherhood will salute you.
But by then you will have lost your mental marbles. You will no longer be a productive citizen.
And the coronavirus will have changed the world forever — and not in your favor. Because you will be in the high-risk age group.
Author Profile
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out
Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page
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