A funny thing happened along the boring road to retirement
WHEN Craig Brien told family and friends of his plan for a career change, they could have been excused for thinking he was joking.
After two decades promoting other people's work in the advertising industry, the 40-year-old is putting himself centre stage - as a stand-up comedian.
"It's probably the hardest and most confronting thing I could imagine doing. I thought if I could do that, I can do anything," he says.
Mr Brien, from Brisbane, is among a growing number of people making mid-life career switches.
A study by researchers from Monash University in Melbourne found that about one in seven Australian workers changes jobs each year, with about a third of those switching to a new career.
Sometimes it is triggered by a major life event such as divorce or redundancy, but for many it is about fulfilling a long-held dream that may have been put aside as "unrealistic" for years but refuses to go away.
"I was always a bit of a class clown so I knew I had it in me. I knew I could make people laugh," Mr Brien says.
While a successful career as a creative art director allowed him to use some humour in his work, there were limits. "You could write a funny TV or radio ad and the client would kibosh it because they were frightened of offending someone," he says.
So a year ago, he decided to take the leap and put his comedic talents to the test.
Mr Brien began with a six-week course of workshops in stand-up comedy run by Brisbane based Robert Grayson and then began going to open-mic nights early this year.
He now performs three or four times a week at venues including the Newmarket Hotel, Bank Vault Lounge in Fortitude Valley and Kitty O'Sheas in Paddington.
He's still juggling freelance advertising work to pay the bills, writing his own comedy material during the day and performing at night.
"It's a matter of consistently honing. Sometimes it works great, sometimes you learn the hard way that it does not work," he says laughing.
"In a perfect world, it would be great to make a full-time living from comedy, but it is tough. If it happens, it happens."
Russo Recruitment general manager Denise Love says that while younger people in generations X and Y expected to have several careers during their working lives, it was a bigger leap for some baby boomers to decide on a major switch.
But very few regretted it after doing so.
For some, the trigger was a sense of stagnating where they were, because their employer was not investing in them through skills development even though they might have another couple of decades left before retirement.
"People like to be consistently challenged," Ms Love said. "They think there has to be more than this."
But one obstacle to people re-inventing themselves in the workplace was pigeon-holing themselves. "Sometimes, they just can't identify in themselves what they are capable of," she said. "People struggle to see how transferable their skills might be."
