The multigenerational workforce: Putting the spotlight on the over-50s

I am fortunate enough to get to engage in a variety of thought-provoking conversations in my role, speaking with thought leaders around the world about the big themes that surround modern work and the role of the talent industry. One topic that was high on the agenda at our #TalentConnect conference in New York in October last year was the idea of the multigenerational workforce.?

The emerging issue of more diverse age groups entering the workplace has been around for a while, with Forbes recognising a few years ago that managers will soon have to cope with up to seven generations working alongside each other for the first time. But while much focus has been on the needs and wants of Gen Z coming into work, born later than 1996 and with their own demands and preferences, far less attention has so far been paid to the older generations staying in the workforce for longer. In addition to this, every December, LinkedIn editors ask our community of Top Voices and experts to share the Big Ideas they believe will define the year ahead and it was interesting to see the top idea was the topic of an “unretirement” wave in 2024 .?

To that end, I was delighted to get to sit down with Lyndsey Simpson last month, the Founder and CEO of 55/Redefined , who is on something of a crusade to shift the multigenerational conversation.?

“We have added 30 years to life expectancy,” says Lyndsey, “so this generation now hitting their 50s and 60s is absolutely nothing like their parents. They don’t dress like them, they don’t think like them, they don’t spend like them and they are healthier and wealthier. But nothing corporate seems to have changed. We are still retiring people in their mid-60s and socially expecting people to follow the path of their parents.”?

Redefining retirement in today’s workforce?

As CEO of The Curve Group five years ago, Lyndsey was hired by a large bank that was subject to? regulatory reviews, unpicking work done in the 1990s. As they sought to hire bankers from that era, they found most were long retired but nevertheless jumped at the chance to get back into work. In eight weeks, Lyndsey and her team hired 400 people out of retirement as contractors for that project. “None of those people were on any form of platform or job board, and yet they almost all had the same response when we called them: retiring had been the biggest mistake of their life,” she tells me.?

Lyndsey launched 55/Redefined in 2021 to tackle patterns of ageism and help individuals and organisations think differently about the untapped potential of older generations. The global group of companies includes Jobs/Redefined ;? a jobs board where people can search and apply for jobs with named employers that expressly want applications from candidates over 50, as well as Life/Redefined , a consumer platform, and Work/Redefined , which helps corporates attract and engage talent and consumers in the over-50s bracket.?

55/Redefined has helped to unearth a trend whereby individuals, particularly in their 50s and beyond, are seeking re-entry to the workforce, indicating a shift away from traditional retirement towards continuous engagement in professional activities.?

So what motivates this segment of the workforce, and what are they looking for? “The biggest influence is around affluence, actually,” says Lyndsey. “There is a category of people that need to work much longer, and that is going to become increasingly prominent over the next five years as the number of people in that category without final salary pension schemes increases.”?

She adds: “At the same time, a number of people in this age group can afford to be retired, but they just don’t want to be retired.”?

Fostering age inclusion and diversity for business success?

Recognising the value of experience as a resource rather than a metric, what can employers do to capture this demographic? For the group that financially needs to work, Lyndsey says the employer focus needs to be on developing pathways that recognise the skills of older people and allow them to work while maintaining everything else they have going on in their lives. This age group is a sandwich generation, typically supporting elderly parents, adult children and sometimes grandchildren too, whilst also seeking to earn an income.?

The drivers for the more affluent group are different, focused around flexibility, purpose and overcoming boredom. “When you ask them why they retired, they say they could afford to but now they are bored,” says Lyndsey. “They didn’t know what they could do instead, or how to evolve their skills. We have been encouraging employers to create brand new pathways – why not make your apprentice scheme open to over-50s? Why does it have to be just 18 to 21-year-olds that benefit from those roles?”?

With re-skilling, purpose and flexibility so high on the agenda of talent managers looking to solve for talent shortages already, it is easy to see how a shift to remove some of the barriers of ageism in the workplace could unlock this vast untapped potential just as much as it benefits other employees.?

The new age of work: embracing flexibility?

We are all living longer and yet we can see the workplace struggling to adapt and keep up. The book The 100-Year Life , written by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, was published in 2016 and started a global conversation about what changes we all need to make in order to turn greater life expectancy into a gift and not a curse.?

Lyndsey says: “The staggering statistic is that a baby born this year in the UK should live until 103, and in the United States that is now 104 and in Japan it is 107. The only way that figure is going is up, and of course that is the average so plenty will live longer than that.”?

She adds: “If you overlay the fact that we have the world’s lowest birth rates, as increasing numbers of people choose not to have children or to have one or two rather than four or five, then you see our replacement rate has dropped as well. From a talent and workforce lens, our working age population is going to shrink by 25% over the next few decades while the over-60s grow to over 40%.”?

Everyone will become an older worker in their career and declining birth rates will accelerate the trend. In the US, 35% of the US workforce is over 50 and that will grow to 40% by 2032.?

For corporations, the only talent pool that is growing right now is that over-50s demographic, so each generation coming into the workforce now is smaller than the one before. Some 65% of Baby Boomers say they plan to work past age 65 or not retire at all.??

Still, as healthy life expectancy goes up, people are not currently being encouraged to work longer. “We know that 30% of the over-50s that we survey believe they have been forced to retire earlier than they would have chosen to do so,” says Lyndsey. “And then there is also a huge group of people being made to feel uncomfortable at work. A friend of mine is a chief inspector, he’s 55 and has been in the police since his late 20s. Pretty much every week his colleagues ask him when he’s retiring; in his head he has another 20 years of doing what he’s doing.”?

Often there is a perception that if you can afford to retire, why wouldn’t you, but that misses the point. There is a growing demand for flexible work arrangements that cater to the unique needs and desires of older works, plus a need to recognise the importance of providing meaningful engagement.?

“If we can create enough opportunities for people to do meaningful, purposeful and interesting work, be that paid or unpaid, we can see that positively influences everything else,” says Lyndsey. “It solves for the critical skills and talent shortages that employers have, because they can use a native talent pool in their location. It solves for the individual because suddenly their life is full of purpose and, if it does involve paid employment, it is solving for the financial challenge, raising taxes and creating this ripple effect.”?

Adapting to demographic shifts in business and consumer markets??

The good news is that the penny is starting to drop. Just as consumer brands like Dove are shifting their focus to older customers, employers are beginning to follow suit. As well as age-inclusive apprenticeships, companies are looking at how to make better use of their older talent to drive benefits for the business.??

“The likes of 安盛 and Barclays are leading the way on this for financial services,” says Lyndsey. “If you ring your insurance company to make a claim, or you ring your bank to report a bereavement or a financial loss, you want to speak to someone with life experience, not someone on a script. You want empathy. These businesses are adjusting their operational processes and their staffing to align age with the demographic they are speaking to and the complexity of the queries coming in.”?

This ties in well to the technology transformation conversations I am having. While there is so much fear of AI taking jobs, the truth is that it is not taking them but changing them. If you are not changing your job, your job is changing on you. But as we embrace emerging and enabling technologies, there is going to be more focus on the human element of roles, which feels like a good avenue for this movement. Indeed, our latest Future of Work report shows Boomers are the generation least likely to see their jobs disrupted by GAI.???

Navigating career transitions and lifelong learning?

Likewise, in an era of talent scarcity, the unlocking of talent pools achieved by looking beyond age, education and job experience to instead focus on Skills First hiring is only going to continue gaining traction. As we open up new industries and create demand for brand new skills – like green skills , for example, where the amount of new skills being demanded is going to overtake supply by 2026 – why not train up people of all ages to take on those roles???

There are many advantages to hiring older workers: Lyndsey points to data showing the over-50s take fewer sick days and are more loyal, typically staying in roles three times longer than those in their 20s and 30s, even if they are hired in their 50s. A report from the World Economic Forum also highlights how a multigenerational mix helps foster business resilience and spur innovation in teams.?

A key element of this is skills augmentation and aptitude. Critical support is needed for individuals aiming to reinvent their careers through transitions and lifelong learning, contributing actively at any age. Lyndsey says: “A lot of people in their midlife are doing the jobs they do now not because they have a natural aptitude for them but because those were the circumstances 30 years ago when they entered work. Maybe they started in low-skilled jobs but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the aptitude to improve their skills and relearn.”?

She gives the example of a major supermarket that ran aptitude tests for cashiers and shelf-stackers in mid-life during the pandemic and retrained many of them to be data scientists. “It’s amazing – they have the aptitude, they can retrain, and all of a sudden you have this affordable, loyal group of people that can solve for these massive skills shortages,” she says.?

Revolutionising recruitment and retention strategies?

As talent professionals increasingly buy into the story that 55/Redefined and others are telling, the challenge is that this can feel like just another massive transformation that businesses need to tackle. Lyndsey makes a strong argument that addressing ageism in an organisation and just being more inclusive in recruitment and retention will help this group while also solving for many other issues, be that addressing retention challenges or skills shortages, enhancing learning and development pathways, or strengthening wellbeing and purpose in the employee value proposition.??

Still, I can imagine many grappling with the question of where to start. Lyndsey suggests an Age Data Diagnostic to drive action planning, because – as with so many of these challenges – it helps to really know what you’re dealing with at the outset. Employers should also analyse every element of their employee experience through the eyes of an over-50s worker: what does the recruitment process look like, how does the career page appear, how do the policies and practices stack up, and what about learning and development??

By shining a spotlight on the status quo, it will likely become clear where new initiatives might be helpful, where tweaks will have an impact, and where longer term change might be required.?

“Most talent professionals are brilliant at diversity and inclusion,” says Lyndsey. “But they are generally allies to other people, supporting underrepresented groups in their organisation. The one thing about age is it cuts across every other diversity statistic, so God willing we will all be a day older tomorrow than we are today. Very rarely can you create an impact and a change in your business that you are going to directly benefit from, but this is one of those situations.”?

Getting practical?

Other practical steps might include making use of the age-inclusion solutions that 55/Redefined can offer, from Recruitment Advertising Campaigns aimed at attracting passive candidates, to learning and development solutions and engagement strategies. Setting up employee resource groups (ERG) around age can make a positive impact – at LinkedIn, Deirdre Wafer and the team think about age through our ERG called Wisdom, which is for workers aged 40+ and allies, with a goal of creating a thriving community inclusive of employees at all stages of life.?

Seeking accreditation and recognition for age inclusion is also valuable. Retailer Boots, where over 25% of the workforce is over 50, started by becoming accredited, formalising their good work in age inclusion, and then creating a three-year roadmap to further this agenda.?

Lindsay encourages employers to open apprenticeships and other new career pathways up to over-50s, saying that removing age limits on such programmes attracts a more diverse range of applicants eager to reskill and engage. A shift in focus to skills augmentation, rather than reskilling, also highlights the need to place greater value on existing skills held by the over-50s and how those can be tailored to new workplace dynamics. AI’s rise creates a demand for older workers with extensive operational experience who can train and monitor AI datasets by adding the lived experience to the age of automation, for example.?

I’d love to hear about what your organisation is doing to embrace the older generation and your thoughts on my interesting discussion with Lyndsey. Do also look out for more pieces in this ‘In Conversation’ series, as I continue to talk about some of the current big topics with industry leaders.???