Entrepreneurship in Mid-career

This chapter addresses the situation of those who begin an entrepreneurial venture in their mid-career. Defining exactly when mid-career begins and ends is a challenging exercise as it seems to be mostly understood as a period without specific boundaries that lies somewhere between the first few years of employment, when one is considered to still be a relative newcomer, and the final few years prior to retirement. One attempt by Saunders (2008) placed it as not less than ten years’ working experience and not less than ten years prior to retirement. Others (e.g. Reining 2004; Winkle man 2007) have defined it largely in terms of a state of mind, associated with a period of stagnation or career plateau in between stages of career advancement. More recently Lindstrom (2011) classified career stages based on earlier work by Super (1957), and a combination of previous empirical studies have divided careers into four stages largely underpinned by age, though to a lesser extent still associated with the conditions underpinning upward progress. These stages consist of new career entrants up to age 20, early career people in the 20–34 range, mid-career 35–49, and late career people 50–65. Equating mid-career with age would place mid-career employees in the broad 35–50 range, but these categories are only guidelines given that chronological age is a convenient and easy way to select which people fall into the category of mid-career incumbents.