Teacher Builds Better Balance for Fun in Retirement

Many people think of retirement as a period in life full of baking cookies, swinging on the porch, and golfing. But for many retirees, that routine might sound like a nice vacation for a little while but becomes tedious on a daily basis.

Karen J. was one of those retirees. She didn't want to settle quietly into her hobbies after she retired from teaching. The desire to fill up some of her time and satisfy her quest for continual learning took her back to the classroom part-time.

However, it didn't take long for her to realize a traditional teaching role in a classroom was no longer an ideal fit for her retirement years. "Being inside the school working with a very limited and tight schedule, I decided I wanted more flexibility," Karen says.

Seeking a Better Work-Life Balance in Retirement

Karen also needed a job that provided more consistent income to add to her savings and boost her hobby fund. "Not getting a salary when schools are closed, on holidays, during vacation weeks, or over the entire summer was a bit stressful!"

But Karen found that it was challenging to find a part-time job that matched her professional skills and experience on her own, which led her to FlexJobs.

Discovering New Options

Through FlexJobs, Karen was able to land not one but two part-time, flexible positions with TutorMe and Littera Education. And together, they fit her needs perfectly. Now, Karen is busy "enjoying more of life by having time for other pursuits, piano, crafts, church activities, or simply being with friends."

"I enjoy being at home because it is quiet. I can take breaks when needed, schedule work, and not feel rushed to get from one place to another by a certain time. Now, I can leave for appointments or just have additional time for my hobbies."

Beyond balancing her time, Karen enjoys staying relevant and learning new skills that align with her lifelong career. "These roles give me additional training since I am a lifelong learner and still would like to help students achieve success."

Advice to Anyone Considering a FlexJobs Membership

Like many retirees, Karen noted that it's a balancing act to fight against age bias and other stereotypes about retirees. She suggests that other retirees update their resumes strategically with a focus on communicating both their experience and desire to keep working.

And even though budgets can be tight in retirement, Karen thinks the paid membership is well worth it. She says, "Try it for three months and keep looking! FlexJobs has a LOT of jobs."

Create Your Own Retirement Rules

There is no standard blueprint for retirement anymore. As Karen discovered, you can create your work-life balance rules.

If you're ready to explore your flexible work options, FlexJobs can help. We post jobs daily in over 50 career categories, and we have an entire team of real people dedicated to verifying those jobs to ensure that our members only see legitimate opportunities. Take the tour and discover all of the ways FlexJobs can support you!

Balance and a Rewarding Career Using FlexJobs

For many, the United States Census Bureau study about commuting comes as no surprise. The Bureau's report shares that the average time spent commuting back and forth to work has grown to almost 30 minutes each way. And for most professionals who work in an office setting, giving up five hours of life each week for a commute is pretty standard.

But Sara S. struggled with a lengthy commute combined with long, draining hours. She realized that something had to change. Her work life was taking a toll on her family and personal commitments and pushing her to professional burnout. It was time to take back control of her life.

Committing to Pursuing Balance

Recognizing that she needed a change, Sara looked for remote roles independently. It was only a short time before she realized she was spending more time sourcing legitimate positions than she was applying for and following up on them.

"I had been looking for a remote position for a few months and wasted so much time and energy on fake job leads." Even with the many awareness campaigns, job seekers like Sara are often overwhelmed with the number of scams targeting job seekers. Fortunately, she found FlexJobs, and her job search became streamlined and productive.

Building a Rewarding Career

Sara knew that her next role needed to do more than create balance. She was also determined that it would be a quality position aligned with her career goals. "I didn't want to step backward in my career or be stuck in a position with no growth opportunities."

Fortunately, Sara remained focused on her goals and found a perfect fit in a fully remote role with UnitedHealth Group. Now, Sara can be more present for her family without having to put her career to the side. "I found an organization I can grow with, professionally and personally."

Thriving Throughout All Areas

If you ask Sara how working remotely has affected her life, she'll tell you she's enjoying building better balance in the larger, more apparent areas of her life. "I have more time for the things that are important to me—my kids, my education goals, and my health," she says.

But like most professionals new to remote work, Sara discovered that work flexibility has also enhanced her life in other areas. "I am saving on gas and auto expenses, eating healthier, and I can wear activewear to work, so I go for a jog or do Pilates on my breaks!"

Advocating for Work Flexibility

Now that Sara is thriving in a meaningful role supporting her work-life balance, she has become an advocate for others to make effective changes in their lives. "I have recommended FlexJobs to so many people. It was well worth purchasing the membership."

Her guidance to others looking for more work freedom? Your job search is much more than tailoring a resume and hitting "submit." Sara says, "Don't forget about the value of networking," also stating that, "A flawless resume is useless if no one ever reads it."

Create Your Own Success Story

We hear from job seekers like Sara every day, sharing the enormous impact that flexible work has made on their lives.

If you're ready to build a better work-life balance, take the tour and discover all of the resources that FlexJobs offers to support you in your job search.

Why we don’t set the og:image:alt tag

 Users often ask us why we don’t include a og:image:alt tag in the SEO and social tags that we add to pages. Alt attributes are good for accessibility, so sharing them with Facebook must be a good thing, right? Well, it turns out that it’s not that simple! We actually removed support for the og:image:alt tag in 2019, because we think that it can harm accessibility. Read on to find out why.

Challenges with alt attributes

Alternative text is important for accessibility and to help search engines find out what your content is about. Read more about the importance of the image alternative text. You may also want to learn how to optimize your alternative text for better accessibility and SEO.

Contrary to popular understanding, the alternative text should not describe the image. Rather, it should describe the image’s purpose, which varies depending on usage and context.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) distinguish a few different types of image purpose: Informative images, Functional images, Decorative images, etc. They also provide an Alt decision tree for some quick help on deciding which category a particular image fits into. As a good rule of thumb: Images that are purely decorative don’t need an alternative text. Informative and functional images do.

One image, many alternative texts

The root problem with WordPress (and most similar systems) is that it only allows you to set a single default alternative text. Images often need many different alternative texts, depending on their purpose and context. Luckily, it’s possible to micro-manage the alternative text and change it in the post content, as the default one won’t fit all the use cases. Let’s go through a few examples to better understand this limitation.

We upload the following image to the WordPress media library. The image represents some pizza with pepperoni (note: it’s the Italian version of Pizza with pepperoni):

We set the image alternative text to:

Pizza with pepperoni

The alternative text describes the image, right? We’re all set up then! Wait a moment: Would that alternative text be a good one though? In most cases, the answer is: No. We didn’t take into consideration the actual usage of the image and its context.

Decorative purpose

Let’s say we’re going to use our Pizza image in a post where the image doesn’t add any meaningful information or function to the post content. The image is purely decorative. In this case, we should change the default alt attribute in the post content and make it empty:

<img src="image.png" alt="">

How we built the inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO

 Yoast SEO now comes with a new analysis to make your content even more accessible to all: the inclusive language analysis. This analysis helps you write more inclusively, lowering the likelihood that you’ll exclude someone from your content. That means you can reach a wider audience. But how does this analysis work? And how was »

Read: "How we built the inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO"

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Redesigning the Yoast SEO settings interface

1 December 2022 | Luc Kickken

We have redesigned the Yoast SEO settings interface. Today we’re “releasing” an early alpha of this new interface so you can see what it looks like. We’ve updated, overhauled, and comprehensively improved how our interfaces look, feel, and behave. We’ve also moved some settings and features to be more intuitive, and to better match your »

Read: "Redesigning the Yoast SEO settings interface"

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Notice: increasing the minimum PHP requirement for Yoast SEO

8 November 2022 | Joost de Valk

In March 2023, we will be increasing the minimum PHP requirement for Yoast SEO, Yoast SEO Premium, and all its add-ons to PHP 7.2. If you’re not running PHP 7.2 or higher yet, you really, really should! It will make your site faster and safer. Not to mention, your site will use less energy. That’s »

Read: "Notice: increasing the minimum PHP requirement for Yoast SEO"

Yoast SEO Schema tab helps you set your structured data

 Using the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks, the correct Schema will automatically be added by the plugin. Also, Yoast SEO uses sensible default to describe your pages. If you need something more specific, you can change the content type for specific posts or pages in the Schema tab — you can find this in the meta box or the block editor sidebar. Here, you can describe your Contact page as being a ContactPage so search engines can understand. Find out more about selecting the Page or Article type in your Schema settings.

Use the Schema tab in Yoast SEO to specify different content types

FAQ structured data is so cool

Structured data is hot. It is one of the foundations of the web today and its importance will only increase with time. In this post, I’ve shown you one of the newest Schema additions, and you’ll increasingly see this pop up in the search results.

For more information on our Schema structured data implementation, please read our Schema documentation.