Retirement is no longer what it used to be

6 days ago

5 min read

Studying again in your 50s is just one option for your next chapter

The old three-stage life is disappearing. What replaces it?

For much of the twentieth century, adult life followed a fairly predictable pattern.

First came education. Then work. Then retirement. One day you are working. The next you are not.

It was a simple, linear model, and for many people it worked reasonably well. You trained for a career, spent 30 or 40 years building it, and eventually stepped away from work into retirement.

But our longer lives are beginning to make that model look increasingly outdated.

In their excellent book ‘The 100-Year Life’, London Business School professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott argue that greater longevity is forcing us to rethink the traditional sequence of education, work and retirement. Instead, they envisage a multi-stage life in which periods of work are interspersed with learning, transition, renewal and reinvention. London Business School

And that has important implications for anyone now approaching the later stages of a long career.

Does the word retirement adequately describe how people now want to live their lives?

I spend my time coaching people in their 50s and 60s and I have a problem with the negative connotations around the word itself. Retirement literally means ‘withdrawing or pulling back’. The majority of the people who I coach definitely don’t want to pull back from life. They tend to be looking for their “next chapter”. That’s why I call myself a ‘next chapter coach”.

It’s also worth pointing out that some of these people can’t afford to simply stop work. People’s careers often mean that their pension provision isn’t sufficient to spend their time on Caribbean cruises (even if that’s what presses their button).

But increasingly, that is not what later life looks like.

My experience coaching this group is that these days someone might leave a senior corporate role at 60 and spend the following years with a portfolio of activities and interests. They might study something completely new, become a trustee, start a small business, teach, mentor, take on an advisory role, or work part-time on projects that interest them.

I suppose I’m a good example of this. After a (squiggly) career in advertising and marketing, I retrained as a coach in my mid-sixties

These days people may experience several transitions rather than one.

Gratton and Scott describe this as moving from a three-stage life towards a multi-stage life, where age becomes less closely tied to a particular activity. Careers may be interrupted by periods of retraining, experimentation or renewal, and people may move between different forms of work throughout a much longer life. London Business School

Midlife career change rather than retirement

Many of us in our 50s and their 60s still see ourselves as ‘midlife’ rather than old. As tail-end boomers, we still go to rock concerts, wear jeans and exchange views on the latest episode of “Colin From Accounts’ when we get together with our kids for Sunday lunch.

We may be approaching the end of one career without being remotely ready for the end of productive work.

Those are two very different things.

Living longer lives requires a new perspective

Traditional retirement planning used to focus on the question:

“When can I afford to stop working?”

That remains important. But a longer life introduces a new and perhaps more challenging question:

“What do I want to do with the additional years I may have?”

When Henry Ford II offered pensions to his workers in the 1940’s the average length of retirement before death was around 7 years. For someone leaving full-time work at 60 or 65, the next stage could conceivably last another 20 plus years.

Designing the next stage of your life

Life after you come to the end of a full-time career may contain several different chapters.

You might want more freedom but still want intellectual stimulation. You may want to work, but differently. You might want to contribute your experience without the pressure of a full-time executive role.

And then, what you want at 62 may be quite different from what you want at 72.

The task therefore becomes less about designing the rest of your life and more about designing the next stage of it.

Learning may become part of later life, not something we finish in our 20s.

One of the most interesting consequences of the multi-stage life is that education can no longer be confined to the beginning. As someone who took a break from work aged 30 to study for an MBA and then again trained to be a coach in my 60s, again I’m perhaps an example of this.

The knowledge and skills acquired in our teens and twenties are unlikely to be sufficient for a working life that might extend into our seventies. Gratton and Scott therefore place considerable emphasis on retraining, new experiences and continued learning. London Business School

That learning does not necessarily mean returning to university for another degree.

It might mean learning how to operate independently after decades inside an organisation, i.e adopting an entrepreneurial mindset.

How to build a new network outside your existing professional world.

How to use new technology.

How to turn experience into consultancy, mentoring or advisory work.

Or simply how to become a beginner again.

And for someone who has spent 40 years becoming increasingly expert, that last one can be surprisingly difficult.

Your most important career assets may not all be financial

Another powerful idea in The 100-Year Life is the importance of what Gratton and Scott call intangible assets.

Alongside pensions, savings and property sit things that are harder to put on a spreadsheet: knowledge, skills, health, relationships, networks and the ability to adapt.

Those assets matter enormously in a longer life and I often spend time with my clients examining what their “transferrable assets” might be. London Business School

A strong professional network, for example, can open the door to advisory work or new collaborations.

Curiosity can lead to interests that later become meaningful activities.

Health gives you the capacity to take advantage of opportunities.

And relationships provide both connection and resilience during periods of transition.

In other words, preparing for later life isn’t only about accumulating enough money.

It is also about continuing to invest in yourself.

Experiment rather than trying to find the perfect answer

A multi-stage life also changes the way we might approach career transition.

If there is no longer one prescribed path, it becomes harder to sit down at 60 and produce a perfect blueprint for the next 20 years.

A more useful approach may be to experiment. This is advice that another highly regarded academic at London Business School, Herminia Ibarra, recommends.

Try a trustee role.

Take a course.

Do a small consulting project.

Volunteer somewhere that interests you.

Reconnect with people outside your normal professional circle.

Test an idea before committing to it.

This is also why curiosity matters so much during transition. You don’t necessarily have to know exactly what comes next. You need to create enough opportunities to discover it.