This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tim Perks, a 58-year-old vice president of store design and planning at DICK’S Sporting Goods in Pittsburgh. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
After two decades at Nike, my team and I got cut from the company in a major reorganization. It was my first corporate job. I wasn’t freaked out when I heard the reorg was coming — it had been announced some months before, so everybody knew it was on its way.
In September 2024, just four months after being let go, I started a new executive role as a VP at DICK’S Sporting Goods. I had also been interviewing intensely with a second company when I accepted DICK’S offer.
I’m in my late 50s, and taking this job required my wife and me to sell our home in Portland. We had to relocate across the country to Pennsylvania, leaving a place we loved for somewhere neither of us had roots.
The process of landing my new job involved many interviews, assessments, and sessions with a corporate psychologist. Here are three strategies that helped me to quickly land on my feet as a job seeker in my 50s.
I hired a career coach who helps older execs get hired
I held several retail design roles at Nike across geographies and global teams — my last position at Nike was as senior director of retail design.
The company went through more than one reorganization during my two decades there. As the strategy that had driven growth at Nike since 2020 began to slow, I could see my career growth opportunities at the company narrowing.
I started thinking about what the next chapter of my career was going to be.
Prior to being laid off, I’d already started working with an executive career coach, who helped me clarify my value and build a strategy. When I first met my career coach, I didn’t know for sure whether I was going to get kept on at Nike — but I was ready to make the change one way or the other myself.
This change involved thinking about what was important to me and what I wanted to do next. Through my work with my career coach, I knew it was important how you show up on your LinkedIn profile, so creating my positioning there was how I started preparing for my next steps.
I activated the network I’d built over my Nike tenure
Through my coaching conversations, I’d also started to network with a lot of different people.
Part of the process was writing out a list of my relationships at Nike and starting to understand the types of connections they represented, as well as the skills I sought in them. After 20 years, I crossed paths with a lot of people at other brands, including people who I had worked with at Nike who had moved on to other brands. The key to finding a new position was that I leaned heavily into this network I’d built.
That network proved to be the most valuable asset in the search. I started to build out a presentation for myself that featured people I knew by grouping them in different ways:
The types of leaders they were.The types of connections I had with them.How could they contribute to my search?What I was going to do next.
Then I reached out to each of those folks for coffee or wine to see if they had any thoughts or ideas about my next steps.
One of the network folks that I reached out to began as a simple conversation. I had told her, “I’m not asking you for a job, I’m just reaching out to have a conversation about the next phase of my career.” She ended up inviting me for an interview.
I knew my value
I didn’t have to lower my expectations about pay as a job seeker in my 50s.
Some of this came from my coaching conversations. I knew that I was leaving money on the table staying as long as I was at Nike. I realized I could significantly increase what I was making by going to another company. If I left and later came back, I had a better chance of getting a pay raise than staying at a company for a really long time.
I also didn’t have to lower my expectations to find a new job in my 50s. I never let myself get to that place where I believed that my age was somehow going to be a barrier.
I approached this job searching process knowing I had real value to offer and felt confident I could find a company that would agree. I felt like my age meant much more about my experience and my career level, and it was an asset with value that companies would want.
Working at Nike feels like getting a Ph.D. in working with a brand, and it gave me a lot of confidence in what I could offer. I was mentally prepared to be let go because I knew what I was worth.
Do you have a story to share about landing a new job in this current market? If so, please reach out to this editor, Agnes Applegate, at [email protected].
