Over 50 and looking for work.

I remember the morning I decided to start looking for work again and it was scary. There was a number of issues constantly running around my head that just wouldn't go away.

1. I hadn't worked for 3 years and I'd always felt it was easier to get a new job if you were already in a job - with so many more people in the job market and the recession having reduced the number of vacancies significantly, would this still hold true?

2. I had stopped working 3 years previously due to ill health, so there was a serious concern as to whether going back to work would trigger any of the old health problems. Basically, could I still hack it?

3. Having previously been the 'boss' would I now be able to work for someone else? How good was I going to be at taking orders from someone else? Now that was a real challenge to take on board.

4. And finally, if I found work, how far was I going to be travelling everyday to get there? Hubby had insisted on getting me a reasonable car when we got back from Spain so that I had something reliable for getting to and from work. And I do enjoy driving but it didn't mean I necessarily wanted to spend hours a day in rush hour commute.

But, with all this going around in my head I still sat down on day 1 of job hunting with a huge amount of confidence. I had updated my CV and was ready to hit the job hunting circuit.

It had been 1986 when I last looked for a new job and back then the local newspaper was the place to start. The internet had not become the force it has today and every Thursday was jobs day in the paper. There was also a specific 'jobs' paper that came out once a fortnight which collated the jobs from a number of areas and put them all in one place. This was my first task - to go and get the most recent edition of 'Jobs Today' and check what was in there.

It was coming towards the end of July 2010 and summer holidays were just about to start, a known quiet time for companies recruiting for permanent jobs but I was unprepared for just how little was available when I paid my money and took home a very flimsy newspaper as opposed the the heavier tomes I remembered from bygone days. I settled myself at my desk with a cup of coffee, a large black pen and started to work my way through the pages.

There was 1 suitable job vacancy on the paper and that was 40 miles away. I felt my spirits drop significantly as worry crept into the back of my brain.

But, this was only the first step - next was to get the laptop out and see what the internet had to offer.