Waiting for everyone else to catch up
It’s not surprising that people (including ourselves) have been caught off guard by the idea of “blossoming in late career,” when you consider that only about 100 years ago, the average life span was around half what it is today. This idea is the basis of Steven Johnson’s book, Extra Life.
Institutionally and culturally, 100 years isn’t really that long to adapt to the deconstruction and reconfiguration of life stages – where adulthood comes later (e.g. couples having children in their 30s and 40s) and your late career is longer and much more dynamic than in previous generations (see this Flyer issue on life stages).
Johnson poses the question – what if longevity increases further, but on an accelerated timeline? What if, thanks to AI-driven discoveries and better scientific understanding, longevity increases dramatically in the next 10 years rather than on the previous 100-year timeline?
Further deconstruction of life stages
This and several other factors, such as changing career structures and digitally enabled work and learning, set the stage for further deconstruction of life stages. What you do in your life—and when—is changing. This is worth bearing in mind for late career reinvention.
New career structures allow people to “jump around” in career timelines in a way that they didn’t use to. For example, instead of a career of many years with a single organisation, “patchwork” careers are becoming more common, where people work at a number of different organisations for a shorter time.
Another emerging structure is the “portfolio” career, where a person has multiple sources of income/work at the same time (gig work/freelance/side hustles). Some people are combining patchwork and portfolio structures.
Meanwhile, we also have digitally enabled entrepreneurship, remote working and the rising diversity and availability of digital training and education. A person willing to put in the work can learn about a huge and diverse range of things, largely online. Even ‘traditional’ universities have put parts of their curriculum online for wider audiences.
With these changes we might see more people start up companies at 65, begin university at 45, or skip college at 18 in favour of learning on the job through portfolio work.
Steps to reinvention?
If you’ve had patchwork or portfolio career episodes, reinventing yourself in late career may come naturally, even if some people are caught off guard by your blossoming in late career. If you haven’t, now may be the time to adapt these career structures for your late career chapter.
It’s likely that we’ll gradually see an increasing effort to retain workers in late career and shape the late career workforce more constructively. In many countries, people over 50 are the fastest growing workforce segment, while fewer new workers are entering the pipeline.
National “older workers” week?
And this brings me to a final thought. Did you know that here in the UK it is national “older workers” week? What a name. One company commented, “a title that’s just about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Why not just call it “‘Congratulations, You’re Still Here’ Week?”
We seem to lack the language for talking about late career positively. But let’s keep working on it.
Links
Ways Of Flourishing (reflections on Extra Life) by Steven Johnson on Substack
Better with Age: The Rising Importance of Older Workers By James Root, Andrew Schwedel, Mike Haslett, and Nicole Bitler on Bain & Company
The fastest-growing segment of the workforce? Not Gen Z by Stephanie Henkenius in Mercer
National Older Workers Week (it’s a “brand” of course!)