Longevity in Careers - Longevity Forum Opening Session

Longevity in Careers - Longevity Forum Opening Session

It was fascinating to be part of the audience yesterday at the opening session to mark the 8th Annual Longevity Forum. There was an incredible line up of expert speakers focusing on the topic of Finance and Longevity including Stuart McDonald, Sir John Bell, Dame Laura Lee, Lord David Prior, Andrew J Scott, Brent Hoberman, Octavius Black, Lyndsey Simpson, Anne Boden, Ian Philp and Tamara Rajah.

The key takeaways for me were:-

* Our life expectancy is increasing. Half of children now can expect to live to 90+ years old

* There is inequality in life expectancy and income; those with higher incomes have higher life expectancy

* If you live longer and don't want a fall in standard of living you will need to work for longer

* The real measure should be 'Healthy Life Expectancy' as to work longer you need to be healthier for longer

* The NHS is a 'sick service' not a 'health service' (except for GLP1's) and it has no incentive to pivot to health

* We need a shift in owning our own healthcare journey and to focus on empowering individuals to manage their own health proactively 

What really resonated with me was the need to re-imagine careers for a longer healthy life rather than think of retirement and demonise work, e.g. work : life balance infers work is bad.

All evidence is that work provides important health and wellbeing benefits via five key factors:

1. Purpose

2. Belonging & social connection

3. Autonomy

4. Competence & skills building

5. Certainty, confidence & self esteem

So, we need to invest in re-imagining careers for a longer life and remove / address barriers to continuing work, e.g. 40% of retirees retire due to hearing loss.

How can we normalise and extend careers?

This is what I talk about with clients regularly and generally I describe it as the opportunity to own their career and 'play' to an extent. So they take charge and embrace flexible and fractional work. This is often seen as the bastion of the young but in my mind should apply equally to the more mature among us to better enable us to enjoy our work and balance in life.  

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