About Gary Foster

Hi, I’m Gary Foster. I’m a career and life transition coach, nationally certified executive résumé writer, certified LinkedIn online profile expert, and certified retirement coach. I’m also a “modern elder” who knows a thing or two about mid-career and post-career “turning points.” I’ve struggled and muscled through my share to ultimately discover and get pretty good at what I was wired up to do all along – coach, teach, write.

My favorite thing to do is to engage with middle-management and executive-level professionals, especially in healthcare, who are looking for help as they face their own career or second-half life-planning decisions. I “escaped” from corporate cubicle-nation at age 60 to initiate my biggest turning point following a successful 35+ year career in sales and marketing. I started my own business as an executive healthcare recruiter, a 17-year run that brought me to my passion and life purpose with several important lessons along the way:

1. Recruiting was a good, but not a great fit for me. I didn’t balance the business development and candidate engagement very well. I was drawn to the candidate stories and their challenges and not so much to negotiating deals with hospital HR departments.
2. My hard-wired passion for helping, learning, teaching, writing, speaking resurfaced and drew me in the direction of offering career- and life-coaching assistance for transitioning professionals, most of them healthcare professionals.
3. The recruiting business exposed me to the pervasive lack of knowledge and poor preparation that most – even top-level executives – brought to the job or career change table.

My toolkit of services ranges from a simple résumé review to a customized job search or career transition coaching program that includes all the necessary components for either – résumé, LinkedIn profile upgrade and training, cover letters and executive bios, interview prep.

If your question involves “Should I, or should I not, retire?”, you are in my wheelhouse. A “new retirementality” is sweeping the country and changing the retirement landscape. As a certified retirement coach I help individuals or couples avoid the pitfalls of an unplanned retirement. My “What’s Next” workshop takes prospective or new retirees beyond the numbers to address the non-financial aspects of retirement that prevent many retirees from realizing a joyful, purposeful retirement.