John Tarnoff

John Tarnoff is a reinvention career coach who provides career counseling for baby boomer and late career professionals looking to defy ageism, work beyond retirement, and pivot to a new job or new business as a second act or encore career.Fired 39% over the course of his 40 year career as a Los Angeles-based entertainment industry executive, John learned the secrets of turning setbacks into successes. When his tech startup folded at the end of the dotcom bubble in 2001, he went back to school at age 50 to figure out a second act career, and earned a master's degree in spiritual psychology. Pivoting to a focus on people and career counseling, he networked his way to a new role as Head of Show Development at DreamWorks Animation from 2006-09. In this position, he developed culture-changing creative leadership training and college recruiting programs. In 2010, he joined the Carnegie Mellon University Los Angeles-based Master of Entertainment Industry Management graduate program, serving as a graduate level professor and Head of Industry Relations. In 2012, he launched his Boomer Reinvention(r) career coaching program, a flexible, practical 5-step, 23-strategy methodology. This set of modular tools lets anyone, at any stage in their career planning process envision and implement a second-act career. John began his career as a literary agent, film studio executive and film producer at companies including MGM, Columbia and Village Roadshow. In these capacities, he was responsible for films including Diner,The Year of Living Dangerously, and Pink Floyd The Wall, Branching into multimedia in 1994, he licensed and produced a video game based on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and co-wrote with director John Badham the successful PC/PlayStation game WarGames, based on the movie. John holds a B.A. magna-cum-laude from Amherst College, and a M.A. in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica. He grew up in New York and Paris, and lives in Los Angeles.