The debate about longer working lives has understandably focused on older workers, but what if the bigger challenge is not how organisations accommodate people later in their careers, but whether work itself is designed for careers that may now span five or six decades?

For much of the conversation about demographic change and employment, attention has understandably focused on older workers. We ask how people can be encouraged to remain economically active for longer, we consider what might persuade experienced employees to delay retirement, and we debate pension ages, flexible working and how organisations can retain valuable knowledge before it walks out of the door.

These are important questions, but there is a danger that, by concentrating so heavily on the end of working life, we begin the conversation too late. Because the real consequence of longevity may not simply be that organisations employ more older workers. it may be that the shape of the working life itself is changing.

A longer life changes more than retirement

The traditional model of working life has been remarkably persistent, we learn, we enter work, we develop a career, we progress, and eventually, we retire.

Of course, people’s actual lives have rarely been quite so orderly, but many of the systems surrounding employment have nevertheless been built around broadly linear assumptions about where people ought to be at particular stages of life.

Those assumptions become harder to sustain when working lives become longer. A career lasting forty, fifty or potentially even sixty years creates considerably more space for change.

Industries emerge and disappear, technology transforms occupations, and skills that were highly valuable at the beginning of a career may need to be refreshed or replaced several times. People acquire caring responsibilities, experience periods away from employment, retrain, change direction or discover entirely new ambitions.

Recent workforce research reinforces this challenge. The CIPD, for example, identifies demographic change alongside AI and the transition to net zero as forces reshaping skills and employment, arguing that lifelong learning increasingly needs to support people throughout their working lives rather than being concentrated at particular career stages.

But perhaps the more interesting question for organisations is not simply whether people need to keep learning, it is whether the way we think about careers themselves needs to change.

Age is not a career stage

One of the most persistent assumptions in the workplace is that chronological age provides a reasonable indication of where someone is in their career, and increasingly, that looks unreliable.

A person in their fifties may be embarking upon an entirely new profession, someone in their thirties may already have accumulated substantial organisational or leadership experience. An employee approaching what was once considered retirement age may want another decade of challenging work, whilst another person of precisely the same age may want to reduce their hours, change direction or leave employment altogether.

Two people born in the same year can have profoundly different relationships with work, and  two people separated by twenty years in age may have far more in common than conventional generational labels suggest.

This matters because age can quietly become shorthand, where it can influence assumptions about ambition, adaptability, experience, technological confidence, progression or how much longer somebody is expected to remain with an organisation.

Yet age alone tells us remarkably little about any of those things. The World Health Organization defines ageism as stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination based on age and emphasises that it can affect people of all ages. In the workplace, those assumptions can influence opportunity in both directions, younger people may be considered inexperienced or not ready, while older people may be assumed to be less adaptable, less interested in development or approaching the end of their careers.

Perhaps the more useful organisational principle is a simple one, age is not a career stage.

The skills question starts much earlier

This becomes particularly important when we consider learning and development. If people are going to remain economically active for longer while technology continues to transform work, it seems increasingly difficult to justify a model in which investment in skills gradually diminishes as people move through their careers.

The ILO has highlighted the importance of continued access to training and learning for older workers, particularly as technology changes jobs, alongside opportunities for knowledge to flow between older and younger colleagues. That is important, but there is a question that comes before it – when did the investment begin to decline?

If development opportunities become progressively narrower as someone moves through their forties and fifties, organisations may inadvertently contribute to the very skills gaps they later associate with older workers.

That turns the conventional argument around, so perhaps the question isn’t whether an older employee remains sufficiently adaptable to justify further investment…perhaps it is whether organisations have continued investing sufficiently to enable adaptability throughout the person’s career.

That distinction matters, as one frames adaptability largely as a characteristic of the individual, the other recognises that it can also be influenced by the environment the organisation creates around them.

A longer career may not be a straight line

The same is true of progression, where traditional career architecture has often implied upward movement, greater responsibility, seniority and reward as experience accumulates.

But longer working lives create room for many more possibilities. Someone may move sideways to acquire new skills, step away from leadership for a period, or return after caring responsibilities. They may change sector, retrain, start again, or take on greater responsibility at one point in life and consciously choose less at another.

None of those necessarily represents a career going backwards, they may simply represent a longer career behaving differently. And that raises another question for organisations – are our career structures flexible enough to accommodate that?

Because there is a risk that people whose ambitions no longer fit a conventional upward career ladder are interpreted as having reached the limit of their potential…they may not have…they may simply have reached the end of the career path their organisation has made available to them.

From older workers to longer working lives

This is why we believe the ageing-workforce conversation needs to broaden. There remain important issues specifically affecting people later in life. We know that age discrimination is real, and recruitment can become particularly difficult for older jobseekers. Health, caring responsibilities, financial circumstances and retirement choices can all become increasingly significant.

Recognising longer working lives does not mean pretending that age has no consequences, nor does it mean that everybody will, can or should work for longer. It means recognising that age inclusion cannot begin when somebody becomes an older worker.

If we want people to remain skilled, engaged and able to contribute later in their careers, many of the conditions that make that possible need to exist much earlier.

  • Learning needs to remain available

  • Career conversations need to continue

  • Opportunity needs to remain open

  • Different forms of progression need to be possible

  • Knowledge needs to move in more than one direction

And assumptions about age should not quietly determine who is considered worth recruiting, developing or promoting.

The challenge, then, isn’t simply how organisations accommodate an ageing workforce, it is how they create workplaces capable of supporting longer and increasingly varied working lives.

A different organisational question

That distinction changes the conversation considerably, as if workforce ageing is viewed principally as an issue concerning older employees, the organisational response can easily become a collection of initiatives aimed at a particular demographic.

But if longer working lives are understood as a structural workforce change, the implications extend much further. Recruitment matters, so does learning…career development matters, but so does flexibility, job design, progression, knowledge exchange and workforce planning. Eventually retirement matters too, but none of these sits neatly within a single moment in somebody’s life, they form part of the architecture of the working life.

At the Age Diversity Forum, we increasingly believe this is where the conversation about age inclusion needs to go. Fairness remains important, challenging age discrimination remains essential, and ensuring that people later in life have meaningful opportunities to remain in or return to work matters enormously.

But the ambition can be larger, as an age-inclusive organisation should not simply be somewhere that treats older workers fairly. It should be somewhere in which age does not unnecessarily limit a person’s opportunity to contribute, learn, progress or change direction throughout their working life.

And perhaps that takes us back to the question we started with, where for too long, we may have been asking, “What should organisations do about older workers?” when the more useful question is, “Are we designing work for longer working lives?”

The difference may appear subtle, but its implications are anything but.

References

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) (2025) Lifelong learning in the reskilling era: From luxury to necessity. London, CIPD.

Cooke, F.L. and Rogovsky, N. (2025) Extending the productive working life of older workers: the role of human resource management. Geneva: International Labour Organization.

World Health Organization (WHO) (2025) Ageing: Ageism. Geneva: WHO.