A growing passion for new beginnings
‘Second-act careers’ are becoming an attractive option for those close to retirement
For someone with a career spanning nearly four decades, Elaine dos Santos’s updated CV is a bemusing read. Nowhere on the page does it even mention the 58-year-old’s time as a legal clerk, beavering away since the days of the Trudeau era to help attorneys research cases.
“It really struck me that I’m totally changing my resume,” she says.
In fact, the career she wants to be known for today goes back only two years.
“That’s when the idea of garden design popped out at me,” she says. “I just wanted a change.”
So in March 2011, dos Santos — never a successful gardener, but a lover of plants who was nearing retirement — registered in her first garden design course at George Brown College’s St. James campus.
She devoured the course materials, which taught the fundamentals of horticultural theory, botany, edible gardens, container gardening and basic garden design principles.
Dos Santos finished six courses by May 2012, earning a garden design certificate offered in partnership with the Toronto Botanical Garden.
It was a back-to-school move that dos Santos credits for reinventing her career and laying down a new path toward a greener life in the flower bed.
“I had absolutely no idea it would take me where it’s taken me,” she says.
“When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a landscape designer.”
Dos Santos opened her first business account, printed business cards and joined a gardening club in Port Credit, Ont. She chairs the garden tour committee, and is now working on bringing garden master plans to life for her clients.
“I’ve just done my first kitchen garden for a chef — with this huge grill, a smoker, a pizza oven — and he just entertains his neighbourhood out there in the garden,” she says. “There were all these things I didn’t know I could do.”
While she still works three days a week as a law clerk, during the gardening season her remaining four days are spent either surveying clients’ gardens on site or dreaming up landscape schemes using Pro Landscape software, a computer-assisted design program she’s continuing to learn through a program at Sheridan College.
“I’m definitely moving away from the whole legal administrative background and more into the garden design aspect.”
Dos Santos had never really envisioned herself as a professional garden designer before she visited George Brown College’s continuing education website.
“It was only because I was looking through the course calendar for something that would tweak my interest and my eyes hit that,” she says. “I just knew I wanted to do something different. And here I am,” she says. Her case certainly isn’t an exception, according to Kathleen Abbott, the associate dean for George Brown’s Centre for Continuous Learning. In addition to offering mature students the chance to explore new careers or hobbies, Abbott says, “we have a number of students who have taken our courses and gone on to change careers, or develop new ones in ‘retirement.’” These so-called second-act careers are becoming an increasingly attractive option for baby boomers, particularly those approaching retirement age who aren’t so keen on the prospect of sitting around at home when their minds are still sharp and their bodies healthy. Life expectancies are longer than they used to be, giving some people time to potentially spin a hobby into a new way to generate some extra income.
“It’s not just a second act, it’s a second chance,” says Nancy Collamer, author of Second-Act Careers: 50+ Ways to Profit from Your Passions During Semi-Retirement.
“For a lot of folks, this is the first time in their lives they have an opportunity to choose work they want to do because they want to do it.” Not only does work keep people’s lives structured, says Collamer, it can offer meaning and purpose, as well as extra financial padding. In dos Santos’s case, what she earns from gardening goes toward vacations and a hobby she shares with her husband — astronomy. “It’s play money,” she says, adding, “with astronomy, the toys are not cheap.”
Collamer says an increasing number of older adults are enrolling in community colleges to learn a new skill or trade they were always interested in but never had the time or the means to pursue.
“Going back to school — it could be for a degree, a class, a workshop, a certificate program — is a great way to test out your interests, meet new people, learn new skills and get launched,” she says.
For dos Santos, whether she would be able to grow a career out of her garden design certificate or not, she’d have been satisfied with having the knowledge to keep her own garden thriving. She also just appreciates being able to get out of the office and into the garden, with a purpose.
“It’s changed my life, all the teachers and all the support I got,” she says. “I know I did it for myself, but in a way, they helped me reinvent myself.”