60-Year Career
February 25, 2022
Recent research from the Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL) predicts that many of today’s children can expect to live to the age of 100, an increase in life expectancy that will become the norm by 2050. The downside? For many, longer lives will mean more years spent working—a total of 60 years, to be exact.
In an Atlantic article published in December 2021, Joe Pinsker describes how the current model of work could be redesigned to make the prospect of a 60-year career more palatable. Many of these suggestions call for more flexibility. For instance, Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the lead researcher on the SCL study, proposes that employers allow workers to adjust their hours throughout their careers to accommodate responsibilities outside of work. Parents, say, could work fewer hours when taking care of young children and make those hours up later on, spreading the work across their longer lives and careers.
Others, like Ellen Ernst Kossek, a management professor at Purdue University, argue that reduced workloads at key periods in a person’s life could prevent burnout and lead to richer, more fulfilling lives.
Experts also call for a more flexible conception of retirement. Instead of seeing retirement as a complete end to working life, Carstensen and her colleagues suggest a “glide path” that would allow workers to scale back their hours as they approach the end of their careers. The researchers also introduce the possibility of “returnships,” or temporary returns to work to assist on a project or mentor younger colleagues.
While significant barriers, such as cultural attitudes about consumption and fears about financial security, stand in the way of redesigning work, Pinsker notes that working lives have changed throughout history. Indeed, many organizations are already making strides in giving workers more flexibility, including normalizing hybrid work options and incorporating mindfulness-based practices to reduce stress and burnout.
Meditation and flexible working models, however, are only one piece of the puzzle. For both companies and workers, preparing for and adapting to longer working lives calls for a more concerted effort. The future of work needs to account for not only how work-life balance will look across 60 years, but also the kinds of skills that employees will need to learn and re-learn at different points in their careers. With our working lives growing longer and longer, the expectation that we stay in the same jobs will become less and less reasonable.
Would an employee who has worked in one industry for 40 years be able to switch to another career for the remaining 20 years of her working life? Would a stay-at-home parent face additional obstacles returning to the workforce? Would a bachelor’s degree still be enough to set young people on a successful career path? These are the questions to which we need to find the answers now.
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