We are extending working lives faster than we are redesigning them.
That may be one of the more important workforce challenges hidden within today’s debate about economic inactivity, retirement and longer working lives.
A new labour-market measure introduced by the Centre for Ageing Better provides a useful example. NETER – Not in Employment, Training, Education or Retirement – has been created to identify people aged between 50 and State Pension age who are neither working nor retired. The Centre estimates that around 2.9 million people currently fall within this category.
The problem it seeks to illuminate is real. Too many people leave employment earlier than they intended, while others who want to return to work encounter barriers that make doing so unnecessarily difficult. But at the Age Diversity Forum, we think the new terminology also raises an important question…Do we need another label for a particular age group, or do we need a better understanding of working lives themselves?
Why 50?
Fifty has become a remarkably common boundary in employment policy and research. We routinely encounter references to the “over-50s”, “50-plus workers” and “older workers”.
Yet very little changes universally about someone’s relationship with work on their fiftieth birthday. One 52-year-old may be embarking upon a completely new career, another may have worked for the same organisation for 30 years, someone else may be returning after caring responsibilities, retraining after redundancy, establishing a business or planning a gradual transition towards retirement.
Chronological age tells us something. But it rarely tells us everything. This is one reason the ADF has increasingly been interested in the interaction between age, career stage, life stage and organisational tenure. If we want to understand participation, progression and exit properly, we need to understand the circumstances behind the number.
And why stop at State Pension age?
The other boundary of NETER is equally interesting. State Pension age in the UK is currently transitioning from 66 to 67 and is ultimately a statutory threshold governing entitlement to the State Pension. It is not a compulsory retirement age and does not determine when someone’s contribution to working life should end. So what happens to our understanding of the labour market beyond it?
Someone aged 68 who wants to work but cannot find suitable employment may face many of the same barriers as someone aged 65. Someone aged 70 may want fewer hours, different responsibilities or an opportunity to use decades of experience differently, others will quite reasonably choose to retire.
Those are different outcomes and different choices, yet too often our workforce evidence becomes noticeably thinner once people pass the conventional boundary of “working age”. If working lives are genuinely becoming longer, our understanding of working life cannot simply stop when State Pension eligibility begins.
From longer working lives to better working lives
Perhaps the larger problem is that we still tend to imagine working life as a fairly linear journey – Education → Employment → Progression → Retirement
For increasing numbers of people, that description is becoming inadequate. A working life spanning perhaps five or six decades can contain periods of learning, progression, caring, retraining, redundancy, career change, ill health, entrepreneurship, reduced hours, increased hours, returning to work and eventually retirement.
Those transitions don’t occur at universally predetermined ages, and that changes the question employers and policymakers need to ask…rather than – How do we keep older people in work for longer?, perhaps we should be asking – How do we design work that enables people to enter, learn, contribute, progress, transition, return and remain throughout a longer working life?
That is a much bigger workforce-design question.
The risk of solving the problem by creating another category
NETER deserves credit for attempting to make visible people who may otherwise disappear within conventional labour-market statistics. The Centre for Ageing Better reports that more than one in five people aged 50 to State Pension age fall within its definition, and that long-term illness, disability and caring responsibilities are significant factors.
Those experiences deserve attention, but our concern is that creating another age-bounded category can also have an unintended consequence, as we begin designing interventions around the category rather than understanding the different circumstances of the people within it.
The same caution applies at the other end of working life. We speak about NEET young people, graduate workers, mid-career workers, over-50s and older workers as though a working life consists of a sequence of discrete populations.
Useful analytical categories can quickly become assumptions about people. Age matters. But so do health, skills, caring responsibilities, financial circumstances, occupation, tenure, opportunity, work design and individual aspiration.
Designing for the working life
At the ADF, we believe the opportunity is to move from an older-worker conversation towards a working-life conversation. That does not mean ignoring the very real disadvantages experienced at particular ages, quite the opposite. Better evidence should enable us to identify precisely where barriers occur and who experiences them.
But our response should connect those findings to the whole working-life system.
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Can people enter work?
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Can they continue learning?
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Can they progress?
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Can roles adapt when circumstances change?
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Can someone step sideways without stepping out?
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Can people leave and return?
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Can accumulated knowledge be retained and shared?
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And can someone continue contributing beyond conventional retirement boundaries if that is what they choose?