Why 50+?
Why do I target my services and writing primarily at people who are in or approaching their 50s and 60s, rather than, say, mid-40s upwards?
It’s actually less about age and more about what tends to come with it, and its impact on your work and career. My interests and practice are defined by the kinds of situations, opportunities, challenges and choices that people face in their 50s and 60s. If you’re experiencing them at 45, then of course I can help. It’s just that you’re more likely to be experiencing them – or experiencing them more intensely – when you’re in or approaching your 50s and 60s.
I’ll explain what I mean below. It makes for cheerless reading at times, but that’s one key reason why I focus my energy on this age group: rethinking your work or career can come about through the more challenging aspects of this age as well as through its positive ones.
I’ve picked out five themes under which to discuss the complexity of what can be going on (though in practice, they’re all intertwined). Here’s the first.
Time waits for no-one
The feeling of time and scope running out gets more acute, and sometimes quite abruptly so when you reach a big milestone birthday. As a friend recently put it: ‘When I turned 50, it felt like an open-ended road was closing’. Such feelings can leave you lacking a sense of agency, even if you’re happy where you are and want to keep on doing what you’re doing. Even the best things can feel a little less good if you think you’ve got no choice.
Equally, turning 50 or 60 can spur you on to do new things, perhaps having achieved what you set out to do in your current job or career. You can experience a sense of fresh potential, like being given a free throw of the dice, career-wise.
But while you may be excited about the possibility of making new choices, you may still fear that there are none to make and that it’s all too late and out of your control. As a client who had spent most of their career in human resources put it: ‘I don’t want HR to be the only chair left when the music stops’.
Age brings along other things that can suddenly focus your mind on how you want to spend the rest of your life. It’s a simple fact that events which make you very conscious of your own mortality are more likely to happen to you or to those you know the older you get. For me, it was the death of my sister at 62, just after I turned 60, which made me rethink what I wanted from life and work. A friend had a similar rethink this year after surviving a life-threatening illness and major surgery.
That friend and I are both happy with the significant changes that we then made. Now that we’ve made them, we also share a sense that those might not be the last changes we make. We anticipate more free throws.
It’s complicated
In your 50s and 60s, you can find yourself at the centre of an ever-changing and complex web of other people’s life stages, which can bring both challenges and rewards in terms of time, money, energy and satisfaction. You may be going into and/or coming out of caring and financial responsibilities. Depending on your circumstances, any or all of the following may happen at the same time: children leave and/or return, grandchildren arrive, parents and sometimes partners become more dependent or die. I continually see clients and friends in their 50s and 60s impacted by these familial life events, in various combinations and in shifting forms and patterns. It’s not always bad, but it’s certainly busy, especially when you add work into the mix.
Age does not equal infirmity, but there may be changes in you – not just the menopause, but other physical and mental health conditions, too – which affect your capacity or inclination to do your job as you used to, at this time. Sometimes the work required simply to maintain your own health and fitness becomes a significant additional occupation which you want or need to accommodate.
These external and internal changes may happen just as you’re in your most demanding role to date, or while you’re pushing forward with your career after dedicating time to family responsibilities, or just as you thought you’d achieved a happy balance between work and the other parts of your life. You thought you would have more time – and perhaps you do – but you can get caught out by unanticipated demands and sudden impacts from your environment.
This type of ‘midlife collision’ (as Lucy Ryan calls this convergence of factors*) can bring you to a tipping point and an abrupt decision to make a change. (Lucy Ryan’s focus was particularly on women, but men can be directly or indirectly impacted too.) Sometimes desperation leads to action ahead of thought, including opting out of your job – or out of work altogether – without a plan. And because these components often combine to feel like one single, immutable force – what one of Ryan’s interviewees calls a ‘tsunami of stuff’ – you may find it difficult to identify a single or root cause of your work dissatisfaction which you can then address. The individual bits of stuff which combine to create the tsunami effect are often, in fact, transient, yet the decisions that you make in response to their collective force can have lasting impact, whether positive or negative.
Of course, the shifting patterns of life at this time can also be very positive, giving you more time, money or energy than you’ve had in decades. Recognising this shift and the potential for change that comes with it may prompt you to stop and think hard about how you want to use these newfound resources.
There is also some evidence for post-trauma growth. Once you’re the other side of it, and had time to regain your balance, traumatic events can give you a newfound determination to live your best life.
In all of these scenarios, coaching can help you make space for, make sense of, and make plans relating to your work and career in the context of your wider life. It can help you to exploit opportunities to bring out your best possible future self or simply to hold onto your sense of self when it comes under threat.
Working on or clocking off
In the UK, legislative changes relating to pensions have brought a mix of more and less choice. The state pension age has increased and continues to rise, but the mandatory retirement age has been abolished and you can access your personal or occupational pension from 55.
Whether you draw down your pension(s), keep working, or both, the prospect or actuality of retirement and pension income may be in the mix of your thinking at 50+ in a way that is far less likely even at 45. It’s not necessarily imminent, but it becomes visible on the horizon, whether it’s retirement from a particular occupation or from work altogether.
It may be a horizon you want to run towards, perhaps wishing work to be over for good because you hate it or because you’ve got other things to do. Or because drawing down your pension will give you more flexibility about what you need to earn from employment, bringing new possibilities as to how you’re going to earn it.
Conversely, that glance to the horizon may fill you with dread. Perhaps work gives you a kind of sustenance that you don’t find elsewhere. Maybe it’s essential for your sense of who you are. Or maybe you need to maximise your earnings and pension pot after a late start.
As with much else that characterises this age, things are not categorically positive or negative, but open to interpretation in the context of your own circumstances, wants and needs.
The significant thing here is that the older you get, the more choices you may have, just when you thought you had none. One of those may be whether to work or not, or how much, and another is whether to do the same work or tread new ground. More on that next.
New ground or old ground
With longer working lives a fairly recent phenomenon, there is no real blueprint for career management at this age. Whether you’re carrying on at full pelt or flexing work to fit your other interests and commitments, you’re a pioneer breaking new ground with few role models to look to.
As you enter your 50s and 60s, you may be as determined as ever to step on the top rungs of the ladder, if that’s the way you’ve conceived of your career. You might also feel that your original goals or expectations are no longer valid or achievable or perhaps desirable. Perhaps you’ve simply outgrown them and want a new set.
Maybe you are looking back and feeling so satisfied with what you’ve done that your view of the coming decades is less about ambition of the ‘career ladder’ sort and more about consolidation, experimentation, new challenges, or retirement. Or you feel you’ve been bumbling along, not achieving anything of any significance, and now you want to make your mark, somewhere, somehow, so that you have something to look back on with pride.
Even if you’re happy doing what you’re doing, you may recognise that it stops you from doing something else, such as exploring a path you didn’t take and now want to go down before it’s ‘too late’.
In each case, there are decisions to be made and these will set the scene for the remainder of your working life and beyond. Yet if you’ve been in the same place for a while, you may not know how to go about understanding your options, deciding what’s best to do or making a successful change. You know that you need a different kind of careers support than you had at 20 or even 40, but you don’t know if it even exists. Well, it does – and once you know that, you can find it (including right here).
Sometimes age isn’t just a number
… and it’s not always you who gets to decide what else it is.
There’s a particular nature to the sort of ageism that happens as you reach and pass 50 and again at 60 and 65. Not better or worse than anti-youth ageism, just different and with arguably greater impact, because it may lead to premature and permanent withdrawal from work, with all sorts of consequences.
No matter what your own outlook or view of self, your age profile is shifting in the workplace. (Unbelievably) there may be discussions about when you’re going to retire, and you’re not even involved in them. These may be happening casually among your colleagues, if not among your managers. This doesn’t happen at 40 or 45. You may be fearful of even casually mentioning retirement because of the assumptions that will be made and the danger of being treated differently from then on, even if you’re not going any time soon.
If you entered the workplace a little later in life or took time out to do other important work at home or in other spheres, you may feel out of synch with the ‘normal’ timing and pattern of progress into, through and out of a career. You’ve only just got going and you’re already getting signals that you should be winding down.
You may be overlooked for recruitment, development and promotion because of your age and recruiters and managers may not even realise they’re doing it. You may decide not to bother asking, whether pre-emptively or in response to a negative experience of doing so. The ageist messaging that is all around us can lead to self-limiting internalised ageism and stereotype embodiment (see Becca Levy’s research, for example), undermining your own belief in your competence, agency and validity. As a result, you may not see promotion and development as valid or feasible for you.
Or perhaps you just want to stay doing a good job where you are but find yourself cast as lacking ambition, killing time until retirement or blocking promotion opportunities for younger colleagues. You’re contributing as much as ever but somehow it doesn’t seem to count, because value is attached to newness not oldness.
In all cases, it seems that the onus falls on you to believe in yourself, your value in the workplace and your right to be there. When you’re being impacted by some of the factors outlined above, that can be a big ask and there’s a strong risk of simply giving up.
Yes, this all sounds very dispiriting, and sometimes it is!
However, the first bit of good news is that age is a protected characteristic, and while many organisations do not actively address ageism in their EDI strategies, the law is the law.
The second bit of good news is that specialist career support can help you work out how much of this is you and how much is ‘them’ and how to address both aspects. You can learn to resist the negative narratives, wherever they’re coming from.
No hard and fast rules
I’ve set out above some of the distinctive aspects of being and working in your 50s and 60s, to illustrate why I specialise in this 50+ area. Here are some concluding thoughts on the topic.
There isn’t one way that people are in their 50s and 60s; there are just common threads amid a wide variety of situations, perspectives and needs. And you can certainly find yourself experiencing much of what I’ve set out above before you’re 50. Everyone is on their own timeline and age does not equate to career or life stage.
So, while I focus my practice on work and career at 50+, for the reasons I’ve set out and more, clients in their 40s come to me with a sense that these things are on the horizon, even if they can’t quite see them yet. And they are very welcome.
As I flagged up at the outset, some of this has made for bleak reading. It’s not like all of this for everyone, but there is nothing to be gained by brushing under the carpet the potentially negative aspects of being in your 50s and 60s. As I’ve explained along the way, whether things are positive or negative is often dependent on some combination of circumstances and outlook, and can lead to positive change in either case.
And there are plenty of pure positives. By the time you reach this age, there’s a good chance that whatever has happened to you to date has given you some significant reserves of resilience and flexibility. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, you know more now (including about yourself) than you ever did before. Next year you’ll know more still, no matter what you do. Age is growth, not decline. You just can’t help it.
Above all, there is no set path you need to stay on. You can walk on the grass.
Finally, how do I know all of what I’ve covered here? Partly because I coach people in or approaching their 50s and 60s and learn with every discussion. Partly because I read, write and think about these issues all the time. But mainly because this is my world as well as yours.
* Lucy Ryan Revolting Women: why midlife women are walking out, and what to do about it (2023) - excellent, much-needed and accessible research which I would recommend to anyone interested in how life and careers can look for women at 50+, whether for themselves or to support their roles as career professionals, managers, HR advisors, colleagues or partners.
Photo by Mario Verduzco on Unsplash