What’s age got to do with it?

Questioning attitudes and terminology around ‘late career’ transitions

Note: this is an edited version of an article first published in Career Matters, the magazine of the Career Development Institute, October 2022.

At 61, I took advantage of a voluntary redundancy scheme to leave my senior role in an organisation where I had worked for most of the preceding 32 years. I had previously envisaged working in that or a similar role until 70, but the redundancy enabled a new plan to take shape. I had recently studied for a postgraduate certificate in career coaching, mainly to keep me stimulated and distracted during the pandemic. I now decided to set out on a new career focused on career development, an area in which I had previously worked and which remained of particular interest to me. I took a short break and then began implementing this plan. What struck me, though, is how many friends and colleagues referred to me as ‘retiring’ or ‘retired’, even though I was then still five years away from my state retirement age and openly had a new career under development. This experience led me to reflect on the language and assumptions around ‘late career’ transitions, in both career and public discourse, and to wonder whether I am now retired, a career coach or both.

The impact of age on terminology

Tropes of ‘retirement’ are hard to avoid and can denote both a dream destination (“lucky you!”) and the graveyard of career potency (“are you keeping yourself busy?”) In just one week, three people recommended that I go on a cruise.

In my view, I was simply starting the next stage of my career, in a new professional area, and choosing for it not to comprise full-time salaried work. But in the career literature, such a move at 61 from full-time employment to a different type or pattern of work is labelled ‘bridging’ ahead of full retirement from economic activity (Feldman, 2007). In the real world, it’s called ‘semi-retirement’, with a telling emphasis on the non-work element. Yet if I had been doing the same at 41 or even 51, I would have been ‘taking a career break’ ahead of a ‘mid-career transition’ and looking to achieve a ‘positive work-life balance’.

What do ‘mid’ and ‘late’ signify anyway, especially in a career such as mine, which has neither run neatly along age and stage lines nor been focused in one area? I dropped out of university and married at 20, then started a family. I was 28 when I got my first job other than pub work. Studying part-time in a new field while working full time, I graduated at 38, then became a full-time student, while working part time, earning a doctorate at 42. After a variety of jobs in both my old and new fields, I moved into management at 48 and a senior post at 52. If I work until 70, I will have spent 24 years of a 42-year career in the ‘late’ career age-stage. As we live and work longer, I will not be alone in this.

The real impact of age

This is not to say that my age has no relevance. For example, I am acutely aware of time: is there time to be a learner or become an expert? Can I get good, or good enough, soon enough? The answer is ‘yes’, because I have built on my existing expertise and experience rather than starting completely afresh, even though my work now looks very different. My thoughts about which bit of the career development world to operate in were informed by the ‘career capital’ [Brown, Hooley and Wond, 2020] which I felt would take me to a position of ‘knowing’ in one field sooner than a new start in a completely different area, but also by my particular interests at this life and career stage, living the very experience through which I now support others. I might have pursued some other good options or areas of interest if I had shifted career direction at an earlier age, but it does not feel like a loss or a compromise.

By leaving my job at 61, I brought forward decisions about what I wanted to be doing and how I wanted to be spending my time, which might otherwise have been left unaddressed until I stopped work altogether. I want to make the most of now, and my fear that anything I don’t do now, I may never do, adds weight to the need to keep going and to make smart choices. But a fresh start at this age also foregrounds future issues that I might not have consciously faced up to if I had simply rolled along in my old job. I realise that at some point I may have less energy, capacity or interest to deploy in my work, or I may want or need to prioritise other things. Setting up my coaching practice outside the structures of employment allows me to build these factors into a model that is feasible, flexible and therefore personally sustainable, actively balancing the present and the future, without the need to set it out in stages of retreat.

The impact of words

Why does the terminology matter? Because when you are repeatedly dipped in the dye of other people’s assumptions, it can affect the colour of your thinking. It can shape what you feel you can or should do and lead you to surrender to a supposed norm (Levy, 2009), or make you belligerently resistant to it, blind to the extent to which it may be true by your determination to prove it false. I may have railed against the soft ageism I’ve encountered, but some distinctive aspects to a career transition at this age have informed the choices I’ve made and how I’ve felt about them.

The silver lining is that my age and presumed career stage meant that few people expected me to be doing much during my transitional phase, so I was able quietly to explore ideas, plan my next steps and set up my coaching practice. I also mitigated the very real risk of simply winding down by declaring my ‘career transition’ in some quarters. This gave me a valuable sense of accountability, especially to those who actively supported me in that transition.

Moving with the times

In The 100-Year Life, Gratton and Scott argue that the traditional three-stage model – education, career, retirement – must give way to ‘a multi-stage life with a variety of careers, with breaks and transitions’ (p. 5), with numerous sequencing possibilities determined not by age and stage but by ‘individual preferences and circumstances’ (p.12). Based on the experience outlined above, I would add that we also need language that presents later transitions as a new start, not the beginning of the end. Because I, for one, feel that my best work is yet to come.

References

Brown, C., Hooley, T. and Wond, T. (2020). Building career capital: developing business leaders’ career mobility. Career Development International, 25(5), 445-459.

Feldman, D. (2007). ‘Late-Career and Retirement Issues’ in Handbook of Career Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage. pp. 153-168.

Gratton, L. and Scott, A. (2017). The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Levy, B. (2009). Stereotype Embodiment: A Psychosocial Approach to Aging. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 18(6), 332–336.