ESSAY IT....

MORE SENIOR CITIZENS ARE GOING BACK TO ON-LINE COLLEGES AND THEN OPENING HOME-BASED BUSINESSES

Hovering around age 60, with absolutely nothing to do all day but surf the 'Net, I wanted to open a small business at home with no capital, and so did a lot of other women--college graduates in liberal arts, English, displaced, penniless, sometimes homeless, but health-conscious, and creative. In the past two years, new small businesses opened by persons in transition or unchanged in three decades and over the age of 60 have dramatically increased. Most are home-based low-capital startup firms in the service and information dissemination industry.

Many of these small businesses are being started by women over the age of 50-60+, coming out of college and business or technical schools with no prior work experience. In the past home-based consultancies usually were started by persons who had been in the workforce for many years and who had great experience in the field of their consulting.

Today, due to the difficulty that older women are having finding entry level employment after retraining, the majority of consulting businesses are being opened by women with no previous job experience in their chosen field. Many of the consultancies are formed by autodidactics, people who teach themselves the subject area by reading books on the subject--because they can't afford formal schooling, or because they don't want to sit through exams.

I opened a successful consulting business in San Diego, although I have never worked for pay in a permanent outside the home. I'm trying to save money for retirement. It has become more difficult than ever to find work because I'm 57 and have never held a permanent, fulltime job or a temporary job for more than seven months." Daily I shuffle through reports that older employees rate better as performers than their younger counterparts.

Employers still think new college grads over 50 coming into the workforce with no experience are too near retirement to hire. They automatically assume I'll insist that I've had 30 years experience managing my own household, so I'll demand a high-paying job in public relations just because I have a 30-year old master's degree in English.

I had to sell by my late-fifities, my Web-based novels, articles, books, and creativity enhancement online books and courses or information on domestic violence prevention and personality preferences. That's my writing and publishing business.

I'm renting myself in print. My consultancy revolves around using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator--MBTI^TM classifier to reveal which one of the 16 personality types any employee is. There's also the four temperaments, the 13 personality styles, and the Enneagram (^TM) Consults in writing with management as to what type of work that person would feel most comfortable doing. She believes in doing what you are, and writes books and software scripts on the subject of choosing the right small business, your job, or your awe-inspiring match based on your personality type and the most comfortable fit for that type.

I opened a software reviewing service. I called all the local weekly papers locally and some national magazines and asked whether they'd run my software reviews for free. I also volunteered to attend IT conferences and write up the conference as the issue of a newsletter and send it by email in a template so it could be put on the Web.

A few computer magazines and a lot of throw-away type free newspapers and magazines said they'd welcome the software reviews to fill space and get advertising, but they did not pay. One one-day assignment paid me to attend a conference and write up a 10-15 page issue of an IT newsletter. There were no more assignments after that, and I was again on my own.

I was elated being an entrepreneur and creativity enhancement specialist. I wrote to a hundred software companies asking their public relations managers to send a free evaluation copy of the software. About half of the companies sent the free software. With great appreciation, I wrote reviews of the software. The papers printed the reviews, then called the software companies and got paid advertisements. I had the software, but no pay--but that was a start.

Later, I clipped the reviews and put them together into a book proposal which I sent to fifty computer, career, and business book publishers. Soon I received a contract to write a book on reviewing business software for specific businesses. The contract gave me a $10,000 advance to live on. In three months, I finished writing the 75,000-word book which was published in 1985 by Simon & Schuster, the largest publishing company in New York.

Today, a dozen books and 51 booklets later, my creative writing business thrives as I write up to four books a year and articles, quizzes, and trivia questions/answers. I also focus on writing about careers or personality traits and domestic violence prevention issues and am trying to focus business on writing material for the new media or the Web. My fiction stories have already been published online, and I am's hoping to expand and concentrate on the first love of my writing choice, creating suspense novels.

My latest book is Winning Resumes for Computer Personnel, Barron's, NY '98.Other seasoned veterans also known as senior citizens trying to find the right home-based business after having given up the search to find a job, are going into related information brokerage businesses. The most popular include running electronic bulletin boards and creating databases, searching databases for attorneys and physicians for medico-legal information at $60 an hour fees, and software designing for instructional technology.

Some home-based entrepreneurs are going into desktop publishing of high-tech and computer-related magazines and newsletters, desktop video multimedia sales or design, and personal services. One of the most popular businesses for older persons with a deep interest or hobby in one subject is professional public speaking. No degree or license in the area of interest is needed, just access to information.

Event planning businesses are popular for persons who consider themselves too old to find employment for others, but who have energy and enthusiasm. Video conferencing, seminar and meeting planning, and starting a convention planning and newsletter service for non profit professional and business associations are popular.

There are business opportunities for older persons to start a support group for older professional women looking for work in the creative fields such as graphic design and professional writing. There's money to be made in starting a national support group complete with a newsletter, local chapter meetings, and annual conferences. Older women struggle with limited opportunities, pension insecurity, and myths about their performance, personality, and appearance.

A certain number of employers look at gray hair on women and shut down. White-haired men with wrinkled faces are elevated to professional distinction if they are scholarly. Independent women scholars are seen as old ladies set in their ways. It's overlooked in men, who are judged to have achieved distinction in their careers. It's a double standard that facelifts won't cut out. However, when you own your own business, your clients look at gray hair and think intelligence and mentorship. They want you to tell them what to do.

Employers don't want to be told what to do. They are told to hire people smarter than themselves, but if you're a woman, you're more likely to be told you don't fit into the group when you offer logic instead of nourishment, or when you offer strategy instead of being an extension of housewivery when you're in a position of creative director.

Those in power to hire older women who have not worked before in a corporate environment, but in their homes or own businesses at home think of you as mother-hen trying to make them feel like children again by your protectiveness. Nothing makes a guy feel like the first day in kindergarten more than mothering from an older woman employee giving advice.

What type of small business is the best bet for senior citizens? Learn anything about Internet technology and writing content for the Web, DVD and beyond, computer animation and desktop video or computer graphics for game and Web design if you're into creativity enhancement. That's the business most receptive to seniors trying to start a business in their homes with low capital. In 1985 desktop publishing was the new business on the block. In late 1992, it was multimedia and desktop video, and now it's the extended personality of the Web and personal broadcasting networks online.

I tested the waters and found success here. I wrote to all the Web-related industries and companies making and distributing software in multimedia, computer graphics, desktop video, desktop publishing, and CD-ROM. I explored virtual reality, even asked for free press passes to the computer graphics conventions to see what markets I could analyze in virtual reality and related multimedia.

Success paid off. The computer graphics firms sent me free software to review and write about and use. Each of these programs, if I had to buy it would cost about $600 retail. They let me keep the software.

My computer hardware was paid for by my book advance, but until I earned it, I used the computers in the free lab at a local community college where I took a one-unit course in software testing which cost me only $6. I used to sit in the computer lab from eleven to seven five days a week, teaching myself, practicing, writing, until I could afford my own computer.

There's a computer career for every personality type. I'm now writing a book entitled HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT COMPUTER BUSINESS ACCORDING TO YOUR PERSONALITY TYPE, and how to recruit or job search on the web.

Although older women are finding small business success in low-capital home-based information businesses such as training, information brokerage, and services, too many of the home-based business operated by women and female senior citizens bring in less than $5,000 annually. Freelance writers also average less than $5,000 annually in the U.S.

More bankruptcies are filed by senior citizen women working for someone else part time then by small business owners working for themselves. "About three million older women can't find work," said Senator William S. Cohen, "due to ageism--discrimination against their age. And even when they do find work, females earn less than males with the same education and experience." Cohen is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Aging.

Older males also have trouble finding work after retirement from the military or another job. Their military pensions are often subtracted from their new job salary. Women's experience managing the home is totally discounted in the corporate world because it's unpaid, but full-time volunteerism in an institution is valued.

Industry has spent over $30 billion on its own training programs across the nation each year since 1975. Currently, 55% of women between the ages of 59 and 65 are employed full-time in the workforce.

The average older woman opening a home-based small business has been forced to look for a job after never having worked outside the home. It's a whole new ballgame being 28 or 36 and loosing your husband then it is at 51 or 68, and having to find an income when employers only see you as the radio talk show host's stereotype--a bitter old lady with fresh and young ideas vying for a job in public relations. At 68, a woman is faced with at least 20 more vibrant, verbal creative peak years of good earning power.