The infinite career: why mid-career executives can't retire and how they are pivoting

Berwick opens by saying that many older executives find that age eclipses experience when they look for jobs. In her account, valuable expertise is often discounted, and recruiters tend to favour younger applicants.

She adds that older workers often find the spotlight shines more brightly on early-career professionals.

Berwick says that as global populations live longer, the waning earning power of older workers could pose a tough test for the global economy.

She describes a long life as a gift, but says the rules change when people must keep working for longer.

Berwick says that redundancies rise and new opportunities fall for experienced executives. She calls this a broken rung in the career ladder and says it is incredibly difficult to get a new job at an older age.

She introduces the FT Working It series, which explores issues around the future of work and speaks with senior leaders about making work better. She says inherent ageism in executive hiring affects a large portion of the global population, with millions relying on extending their working lives to make ends meet, and that this is an economic challenge that must be addressed urgently.

Berwick notes that until recently, people might have done the same job or kind of job for their entire career. As life expectancy increases and societal expectations change, a growing number of people are pivoting to new jobs in middle age and beyond.

She then introduces Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice and organisational behaviour at the London Business School, whose new book, Living the 100-Year Life, explores how to plan and profit from a longer working life.

Gratton says that she and economist Andrew Scott wrote The 100-Year Life ten years ago. As a psychologist, she explains that living to 100 has an economic aspect: you have to either save or work. Because most people have not saved, she says, they will have to work.

She also describes a psychological aspect: people will be working perhaps up to their 70s and possibly even 80, and she says that feels really bad.

Asked whether the idea of a corporate career of 30 or 35 years followed by retirement has gone, Gratton says the ladder has absolutely gone. She explains that people who entered work pictured a ladder, climbing rung by rung, and always knew where they stood compared with others. In her view, the ladder provided a whole timetable and structure that no longer exists.

In her new book she proposes another model: rather than climbing, people are weaving.

Gratton says that people in midlife face the future of work as societies age, technology changes, and job seekers and career changers must be nimble and ready to learn new skills. She says an article she wrote for the FT in July went viral about the challenges people in midlife face when they lose their jobs. Many more women responded than men, saying they felt screened out by algorithms.

One reader quoted by Gratton described trying to look younger and less experienced in order to get through an algorithmic test and sit in front of a panel. Gratton says this has created a shadow industry of CV consultants who try to AI-proof CVs so that applicants are not rejected at the first hurdle.

Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org.uk, says she has worked in internet businesses for more than 30 years, always in consumer internet. She spent eight years at Etsy, from when it was a pre-IPO, venture-backed company through its IPO and a major leadership reshuffle and turnaround. Towards the end of those eight years she was made redundant.

She says it was a bit surprising but not a shock, and that it was a gift because it forced her to make a career change she probably would not have initiated herself.

When she was made redundant at the start of 2020, Vanderbilt first thought she might travel a little, but the world had other plans. She said she had always wanted to work in books and had asked herself at various points whether there was an opportunity to do so. Without a job during lockdown, she immersed herself in the online book world and saw that Bookshop.org had launched in the US, and that its model could draw on some of her skills and experience.

She reached out to the founder and CEO and offered to help if the company was ever interested in expanding overseas, drawing on her work for Etsy. She describes this as creating her own job: she saw that the model would be useful in a number of countries and wanted to raise her hand for it. Friends called it bold, but she says it felt so right that it did not seem that brave at the time.

Asked what advice she would give people who face redundancy or are looking for a pivot in midlife, the guest says the obvious answer is not to be wedded to conventional expectations. She says people should be willing to take a step to the side or a step back a little if it is in pursuit of something they really care about and that can put to use at least some of their skills and experience.

Asked whether ageism in the corporate world is getting better, worse or staying the same, the guest says she herself has not been in the corporate world for a while. From what she understands from peers, she says it is incredibly difficult to get a new job at an older age, and that talented people she worked with are really struggling to find work at the moment, which is unsettling.

The film presents Japan's demographic crisis, a combination of a low birth rate and longer life expectancy, as an example of what the future might look like in other parts of the world. Leo Lewis, the FT's Tokyo bureau chief, says that over more than two decades he has seen two or three major changes in working life.

The first, he says, is that the expectation of working for most of a career at one company has begun to disintegrate comprehensively. The second is that men and women now expect to work for a major part of their lives, with very high female participation in the workforce being a relatively recent change. The third is that a shrinking labour force has given workers more power and agency over their careers, unlike in the past when a large labour surplus meant workers did not feel that way. He describes these changes as taking place over the last 10 to 15 years.

Lewis adds that wages have not risen, so with inflation now people feel they have to keep working to pay the bills into their 70s and perhaps beyond, given Japan's very long life expectancy. He also notes that companies need people in the hinterland between their late 50s and mid-60s who want and need to work, which creates a match between the two.

The speaker says that experience should give a candidate many more reasons to be hired and should not see them screened out. She says people have many transferable skills, and that everyone will need to stay in the workforce for longer because of a retirement crisis and an ageing population.

She also says that, from a personal finance point of view, she finds it absolutely chilling that nobody will give you a job apart from one you are very much overqualified to do. She calls this a financial disaster facing Gen X men and women in the workforce, and says it has happened almost overnight.

Claudia Harris, CEO of Makers, a technology training company, says part of her work is equipping older workers with the skills to pivot into tech roles. The film visited Makers' London offices to find out what makes its career switches successful.

Harris says career switchers bring a great deal to companies. They show, rather than tell, that they are interested in learning and willing to take risks, by going back to being a novice and learning things from scratch. She argues that this makes them some of the most powerful and effective learners in the organisations they join.

She also says career switchers bring valuable prior experience, such as having run teams, worked in schools and managed classrooms, or run a bar and coordinated operations. Harris says that one client described Makers as curious problem solvers. She argues that learning quotient, the ability to adapt, is the most important form of intelligence in the modern age, following IQ in earlier decades and EQ in the 1990s. In her view, anyone can build LQ, whether younger or older, and it is about being willing to become a novice again and understanding that you are not stupid, just finding things difficult.

Alastair Campbell, author, podcaster and former spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has written 22 books, the latest being Persevilience: The Word the World Needs Now. He says persivilience, a word he coined, combines perseverance and resilience, and refers to the ability of a person, group or organisation to turn any setback into an opportunity to grow.

Campbell describes his work as writer, communicator and strategist, and says he has added podcaster. He says The Rest is Politics is currently the project that takes up the most of his attention. He still advises different people, parties and governments in various parts of the world, though less than before because of time. He describes his career in three stages: after university he drifted and busked for a living, then became a trainee journalist and worked on local and national newspapers in a career he calls up and down but ending fairly well, and then moved into politics when Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party.

Asked whether persivilience can be taught and whether someone floundering in midlife can pick it up, Campbell says curiosity is the key. He says too many people reach a place where they think they know everything they need to know, and that one of his golden rules is never to go to bed without knowing something he did not know when he got up.

Campbell also says investing in yourself and your network are very important, and that when taking a job he always thinks about what the next job will be. In the age of AI, he says, the important skills are how we use AI alongside our jobs. Berwick adds that FT surveys show the vast majority of professionals now use AI in a meaningful way in some capacity. She concludes that curiosity and adaptability, along with a focus on AI skills, are vital to stay engaged at work into the 60s and even 70s.