I Got Laid Off at 62. So What’s Next?

There is a strange feeling that comes over you when a job ends before you were ready for it to end. It is not just about the paycheck, even though the paycheck matters. It is not just about the title, even though we all pretend titles do not matter until one gets taken away. It is the routine, the identity, and the quiet assumption that tomorrow will look somewhat like yesterday.

For me, the plan was simple. I hoped to stay where I was until retirement at 67 and a half. That was the number in my head. That was the finish line. I was not looking to jump around, reinvent myself, or start over again at this stage of life. I wanted to keep doing the work, keep bringing value, and eventually walk away on my own terms. There is a big difference between leaving when you decide it is time and having life make that decision for you.

This is not the first time I have found myself staring at uncertainty. Years ago, I worked at Xerox, a Fortune 500 company that once felt like one of those places that would always be solid. Xerox was a name people respected. It stood for stability, innovation, and corporate strength. But even great companies change. What once felt permanent slowly became uncertain, and eventually I found myself on the wrong side of a list.

At the time, that moment felt like a major blow. Looking back, it pushed me into a direction I never expected. I took the experience I had gained in the corporate world and carried it into healthcare, a field with a completely different pace, different pressures, and a different kind of responsibility. Healthcare was not where I originally thought my career would land, but I found a place in it.

I brought my background, my work habits, my problem-solving skills, and my understanding of people into that world. I learned that leadership in healthcare is not just about schedules, budgets, inspections, and departments. It is about people, pressure, accountability, and trying to keep things moving in environments where something always seems to be happening. I thought maybe this was where I would finish out my working years.

Now I find myself unexpectedly out of that job, and I would be lying if I said it does not hit differently at 62. When you are younger, starting over feels like part of the game. At 62, time feels different. You do not look at job applications the same way. You do not look at interviews the same way. You do not look at career changes the same way. There is a quiet question that sits in the room with you: how much runway do I really have left, and who is willing to see value in that runway?

That is the part people do not always talk about. Being out of work later in life is not just a professional problem. It becomes personal. You wonder if your experience will be respected or quietly dismissed. You wonder if someone will see the years behind you as wisdom or as a reason to move on to the next candidate. You tell yourself you still have value, but then you have to go out into a world that may or may not agree with you.

I am still looking in the healthcare field because that is where much of my recent experience lives. It is what I know. It is where I have spent years solving real problems, dealing with real people, and learning how operations actually work when the pressure is on. I know I can still contribute. I know I still understand what it means to show up, take responsibility, and handle the kind of work that does not always fit neatly into a job description.

But I also know this moment may be pushing me to look at my life differently.

While I was working all those years, I was also building pieces of myself outside the job. One of those pieces is WorkDrafts.com, a project that came directly from my own experience. It was not built from theory. It came from years of writing, documenting, managing, correcting, explaining, and trying to turn messy workplace situations into clear professional communication.

WorkDrafts is part of my experience turned into something useful. It takes what I have learned from the workplace and puts it into a tool that can help supervisors, managers, and business owners create better documentation with more confidence. I know how many people struggle with writing things the right way because I have been that person. I have written the reports, the corrective actions, the emails, the explanations, and the follow-ups.

So now I am standing in this odd place between looking for another healthcare role and wondering if the thing I built on the side was not really on the side at all. Maybe it was preparation. Maybe all those years of experience were not just leading me to another job title, but to something I was supposed to create. I do not know that yet. I am not going to pretend I have some perfect inspirational answer, because I do not.

What I do know is that I am not starting from nothing. I have been knocked into a new direction before and found my footing. I did it after Xerox. I did it when I moved into healthcare. I did it every time life forced me to adjust when I would have rather stayed comfortable. Maybe that is what experience really is. It is not just knowing how to do a job. It is knowing how to survive the moment when the job is no longer there.

I do not come with an expiration date. I come with years of lessons, mistakes, pressure, responsibility, and the kind of understanding that only comes from living through change more than once. I may be out of work, but I am not out of ideas. I may be 62, but I am not done. I may have wanted to make it to retirement on a smoother road, but life apparently had other plans.

So here I am, standing in the middle of another unexpected turn. I am looking for what comes next in healthcare, but I am also looking at what I have already built. This is not the ending I had planned. It is not the transition I wanted. But it is the one in front of me.

So stay tuned. I will be writing about this journey as it happens — the job search, the doubts, the small wins, the setbacks, the ideas, the frustration, the unexpected lessons, and whatever else comes with trying to rebuild at 62. I do not know exactly where this road leads yet, but I know one thing for sure: I am not going to disappear quietly.

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