Later-career transition is becoming one of the big societal challenges of our time
- Mar 12
- 2 min read
Later-career transition is becoming one of the big societal challenges of our time, but we’re still treating it as if it were a problem that should be solved at the individual level.
I recently hosted a discussion with a group of men in their 50s and early 60s talking about career transition. These were highly experienced professionals — from finance, technology, consulting etc - people with decades of expertise behind them.
The conversation covered familiar territory: CVs, networking, recruiters, AI tools rewriting applications, fractional work. But something deeper quickly surfaced. This isn’t just about individual resilience. It’s increasingly systemic. Several structural issues kept appearing in the conversation:
• Recruitment processes that struggle to recognise transferable experience
• Persistent — if often unspoken — age bias in hiring
• Limited opportunities to retrain meaningfully later in a career
• Very little joined-up thinking about how longer working lives actually work in practice
We are asking people to work longer than any generation before them, yet we still tend to frame later-career transition as a matter of confidence, mindset, or better CV technique.
After listening to the discussion, three things felt clear:
• Later-career transition is becoming a normal stage of working life
• Experience is often more transferable than hiring systems recognise
• We need much better support structures for people navigating this phase
Millions of professionals will go through this transition over the coming decades, which makes this a much bigger conversation than job search advice.
So, what do you think needs to change — in organisations, recruitment, or public policy — to make later-career transitions work better?
If you are struggling with any of the issues mentioned here, please contact me at https://lnkd.in/eQ4FthhV
