Many 45 to 60-year-olds are going through career changes which often mean saying goodbye to the corporate lifestyle, writes Alison Maitland

Tony Shearer, former chief executive of investment bank Singer & Friedlander, doesn't have secretarial and IT support these days - nor does he have colleagues or a chauffeur. Since quitting just over a year ago following the takeover by Kaupthing, the Icelandic bank, he has pursued an independent career as a multiple non-executive director.

"It's a shame not to have the car any more, but it's not a crucial issue," says Shearer, speaking by mobile from his London garden on a blustery January day.

For him, losing the support that accompanied the big corporate job was nothing compared with making the mental shift from top corporate dog to portfolio worker. "The biggest thing, undoubtedly, was feeling that I'd achieved everything for which I'd been training for 35 years - to become chief executive of an organisation of the size of Singer, an environment and a role I enjoyed - and then suddenly realising this wasn't for me any longer," he says.

Shearer, who had only recently stepped up to chief executive from being chief operating officer and finance director, stayed to see the handover through. But he did not want to run part of a larger organisation and left at the age of 57 after less than a year at the helm. "I thought quite hard about trying to get another chief executive role in that field, but that wasn't going to come," he says. "You've got to change direction. It took me six to nine months. It wasn't painful, but it required a lot of thinking through.

"A lot of people came to me and said: 'Will you do this or that role?' The market was telling me there was a role for me in the portfolio route."

Life outside the corporate duvet can be pleasant or painful, depending on whether executives choose the timing of their departure or are forced out. But either way, there are common experiences. "People think what you'll miss is the physical infrastructure of having staff around you or IT systems," says Peter Thomson, director of the Future Work Forum at Henley Management College, which studies changing work patterns. "But what's often missing is the human 'belonging' to something. People go from being part of an organisation and having a role to being just an individual running a little business of some sort. That's quite difficult."

Thomson predicts that more people will make the move, pointing to rising use of online business networks such as Ecademy as evidence of the need for mutual support among independent professionals. At the same time, he expects that the shock of leaving corporate life will diminish for employees increasingly used to "networked" organisations and remote working. Internet chat services such as MSN and Skype already provide "an electronic substitute for being in an office", he says.

Ed Williams certainly has no regrets about taking long-planned early retirement at 50 from Marks & Spencer - where his last senior role was head of corporate responsibility - and becoming a consultant. But he does miss some aspects of office life: the luxury of IT support when his computer breaks down, having a PA to manage his diary (he writes his own diary entries in pencil and has already used up 15 erasers), and being able to bounce ideas off colleagues spontaneously.

In his experience, however, these are more than outweighed by the flexibility and variety of his work. "Having choice is absolutely fantastic - choice of what work I do, who for, when I do it. Being in that position is a privilege," says Williams, who left 18 months ago after a 25-year career with M&S. As a consultant in corporate responsibility and leadership, he says: "I'm now paid to be as truthful as I feel I ought to be."

He tries to organise his time so that meetings with clients do not start before 10am or end after 4pm, so that he can avoid the rush-hour commute. He walks his dog most mornings but works at weekends if he feels like it.

Williams is now helping to plan a seminar programme for 45 to 60-year-olds going through similar career transitions. "There seems to be a huge need for people to take stock of who they've been and where they want to go and to generate a new enthusiasm for the future," he says.

Lawry Bickford (48), another company-man-turned-portfolioworker, gives talks to senior executives making the same move at workshops at DBM, a human resources consultancy. His 2003 departure from Exxon Mobil, following the sale of Mobil Gas, where he was business services manager, took him down an unexpected path.

"I thought all it would take was to write a CV, apply for jobs and get another job like the one I had before," he says.

But it became clear that he should be thinking more broadly about his future. "When I went to my first out-placement session, the scales fell from my eyes. I realised it was about standing back and looking at the whole forest rather than staring at the bark on a particular tree."

He ended up as an oil and gas consultant, advising clients on which fields to buy, sell or develop.

"I really enjoyed going back on my own terms," he says. - (Financial Times service)