The Age of Unretirement

For 35 years, Priyanka Gothi’s mother was a school teacher. Her inexhaustible energy and desire to work and contribute notwithstanding, the former school teacher was forced to retire and was disheartened by the lack of meaningful opportunities to start a second career. It was then that Gothi decided to create a platform for people like her mother.

Previously Retired Not Out, Wise At Work was relaunched earlier this year to actualize Gothi’s vision to unlock generational potential, both for retired professionals who seek to stay relevant and companies that want to tap into this pool of talent. Today, over a thousand retired professionals have registered on the platform, and 55 companies are hiring these professionals on a regular basis. And Gothi’s mother is one of the advisors at Wise At Work.

More solutions like Wise At Work are needed, as the number of retirees looking to retain certain level of work capacity continues to grow. In the US, people over 65 years of age who want to work have increased from one in eight to one in five since 1998, and the number has doubled in the UK and tripled in Germany during the same period. According to a survey of 3,215 workers by online employment website CareerBuilder, half of those aged 60 or older said they plan to keep working until at least 70, and 20% said they don’t think they will ever retire.

When Retirement is only a Process

While there are various reasons for post-retirement work, or unretirement, such as financial gains, intellectual stimulation, social engagement, physical and mental health maintenance, a study by global policy think tank RAND Corporation found that the need for income is not a major innovator. This corresponds with some of the findings in a Wise At Work study, where white-collar professionals ranked money as fourth in priority.

Increasingly, many begin to see retirement as not a permanent state but a process, partly because they find that they don’t like retirement as much as they had anticipated, partly because they begin to crave the intellectual and social engagement that the workplace offers. In six years’ time, the global average life expectancy will reach 73 years (85 years in the case of Hong Kong). As people live longer, they are also realizing that too much free time spent on fishing and writing isn’t necessarily a good thing — like many millennials, retirees also seek purpose in life.

Challenges Faced by Unretirees

However, the willingness to continue to work is not always met with access to meaningful opportunities, one of the reasons being ageism, or age discrimination. According to a survey of 3,900 workers aged 45 or over by AARP, 61% of respondents have either seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace, and 91% of these older workers believe ageism is common. Additionally, in the US, slightly more than half of over-50 full-time employees in long-held positions report to have been forced to retire, which led to long-term unemployment or reduced weekly earnings by at least 50% for two years or more.

A similar trend can be seen in Hong Kong: despite the growing importance of mature worker employment (the number of older persons in the labor force has increased 198% from 2007 to 2017), a survey by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) found that more than one in three mature workers aged 50 or above have faced some form of age discrimination at the workplace, and nearly one in four report having been denied a promotion because of their age. What’s more, age discrimination against employees over 50 years of age isn’t felt only by mature workers — more than two-thirds of workers across other age groups corroborated the finding, too.

Additionally, employers are hesitant about hiring retired professionals, who they perceive to be lacking in skills in a knowledge-based economy. In Hong Kong, 56% of employers surveyed by the EOC think that mature workers are “resistant to change in work pattern”, and 54% see “drop in productivity” as a potential consequence of hiring mature workers. Intriguingly, response from the surveyed employees seems to correspond to that from the employers: 56% believe “resistance to change in work patterns” and 54% in “drop in productivity” are a concern for employers when hiring mature workers, with 52% considering “conflicts with young employees” to be another factor that deters employers from hiring mature workers.

Upon realizing that companies weren’t able to hire as many retired professionals as they wanted to because of a skill gap, Priyanka Gothi transformed the platform into more than just a job board of opportunities. Through the job board, employers can connect with potential candidates and schedule interviews. Technology or development online courses are available for sign-up, and the platform allows retired professionals to create an entrepreneurial career, such as by listing themselves as advisors for startups.

Wise At Work also offers corporate training sessions, which are designed to drive cross-generational collaboration and innovation. Companies can also use the platform to list courses and events, as well as conduct focus groups, enlisting Wise At Work’s members to gauge their needs.

What’s encouraging is that there is an increasing number of social enterprises and organizations like Wise At Work, dedicated to upskilling retired professionals and connecting them with opportunities to help them stay resilient and relevant. The Senior Planet centers in the US are a program run by Brooklyn-based non-profit Older Adults Technology Services (OATS), which was founded in 2004 to tackle ageist stereotypes and is known by its slogan, “aging with attitude”. In Hong Kong, OHH Dear Communications Company Limited recruits and trains up seniors as ambassadors for products and services, and connects them with modeling opportunities to promote a more positive image and understanding of aging.

Let Multi-generational Workforce be the Norm

The world’s population isn’t getting younger. The number of people aged 60 or over is expected to more than double by 2050, rising from 962 million in 2017 to 2.1 billion globally. In the US, for example, there will only be three-and-a-half working-age adults for every retirement-age person by 2020, and that ratio will fall to two-and-a-half in another two decades’ time. From the US, UK, Germany to Japan, employment for those aged over 55 has been increasing since 1998, accounting for at least half of the jobs created.

More and more people now see retirement as a temporary break from a demanding career. As individuals and businesses, we need to reassess our readiness for a multi-generational workforce with a bigger portion of senior workers, not just because the global population is aging, but mature workers, with their rich expertise and life experiences, can add immense value to companies.

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