From Fortune 500 to Founder: How Colleen Paulson Built Ageless Careers—and Why Women Over 50 Are the Most Underestimated Entrepreneurs in America
Download MP3What happens when a top-performing Fortune 500 engineer decides the system isn't worth fighting anymore—and builds something better on her own terms?
In this episode of Build Your Own Boat, host Janine Vanderburg sits down with Colleen Paulson, founder of Ageless Careers and one of LinkedIn's most trusted voices on age discrimination in the workplace. Colleen holds an engineering degree and an MBA, built her career at Procter & Gamble and FedEx, and walked away from it all after being told she could come back to work full time—or not at all. No job share. No flexibility. No exceptions.
That was 2006. Since then, she has built a thriving practice helping professionals over 50 fight age bias, rewrite their stories, and land roles that actually value what they bring. She has worked with more than a thousand executives, grown a LinkedIn following approaching 100,000, and rebuilt her entire business—twice—on her own terms.
This conversation covers all of it: the corporate ultimatum that made her decision easy, the single cold email that launched her business, what age discrimination actually looks like up close, and what she would tell any woman sitting at a kitchen table wondering if she has what it takes to start something new.
She does. Here's the proof.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Why flexibility—not ambition—was the breaking point that pushed a Fortune 500 top performer out the door
- How one cold email to a Yahoo Finance columnist became the foundation of a 20-year business
- What age bias really looks like when experienced professionals walk through the door of a hiring process
- Why "staying in corporate" is no longer the safe choice—and what the data says about who is actually at risk
- The LinkedIn strategy that rebuilt Colleen's business after COVID and now drives more than 80% of her clients
- Why women over 50 are uniquely positioned to build businesses—and what most of them are still getting wrong
- How to find the "through line" in a nonlinear career and use it as your greatest competitive asset
- The one thing Colleen wishes she had done 10 years earlier (and why it's not too late for you to do it now)
Where to find Colleen Paulson
🌐 Website: agelesscareers.com
💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/colleenpaulson
