Too young to retire, too old to hire – the crisis engulfing the over-55s

We keep being told that we will have to work longer. The state pension age is rising, retirement is becoming less affordable and policymakers increasingly talk as though employment into our late sixties, perhaps beyond, is simply the new normal. There is just one problem: employers do not really want us. Lose your job at 58 and you could still be nine years away from state pension age. That is not a short glide into retirement. It is almost another decade in which you may need – and want – meaningful, reasonably paid work. Yet, new research from Fidelity International has ranked the UK last among the G7 countries for how well it supports workers aged 55 and over to remain in employment. Its Longer Working Lives Index gave Britain just 29 points out of 100, compared with 58 for Italy and 56 for the US. Shorts Britain does not just have a retirement problem. It has a late-career problem: too young to retire, but increasingly treated as too old to hire. The Centre for Ageing Better has even coined a new category for this neglected territory: Neter – not in employment, training, education or retirement. Some 2.9 million people aged 50 to state pension age fall into this group, with 925,000 interested in or actively seeking work. I have worked in career development for decades. During the 2008 financial crisis, I wrote a book called How to Get a Job in a Recession. It was a difficult labour market, but there was still a reasonable assumption behind much of the advice we gave people: improve your CV, network effectively, prepare better for interviews, keep your skills up to date. Do those things well and you could improve your chances. The traditional advice for jobseekers is outdated I am no longer convinced that is enough. Over the past year I have watched experienced directors, marketers, engineers, HR professionals and project managers announce on LinkedIn that they are looking for work. Many have decades of experience and strong professional networks. Some have been searching for months. They are doing the things we have always told people to do. And still they cannot find meaningful work. This summer, Stacey Duguid, a former fashion editor, went viral after speaking about the “silent shame” of being “unemployable” in mid-life. The 52-year-old was inundated with messages from others her age who were being turned down for hundreds of job applications, and has launched a campagin for change. Rachel, 55, an experienced communications professional, has noticed the change since returning to the job market. After applying for around half a dozen roles without an interview, she was taken aback. “I always would get called for an interview,” she told me. Seeing organisations such as The Big Issue, the Environment Agency and Ecotricity on her CV had previously almost guaranteed one. “It’s knocked my confidence. It’s made me worry that I’m too old,” she says. With another 13 years before state pension age, she finds herself asking: “What the hell am I going to do?” Stacey Duguid’s social media posts about struggling to find a job went viral. She has now removed her age from her CV (Photographer: Dave Benett/ Getty) The experience is already changing how she thinks about her future. Rather than assuming she will continue along the professional path she has followed for decades, she has begun exploring other possibilities based around personal interests. It is not a reinvention she had expected to be contemplating at this stage of her working life. Career planning matters. But it cannot make an ageist employer hire you. You can maintain your skills, contacts and employability and still find that someone has already decided what a 61-year-old represents: too expensive, too set in their ways, too close to retirement. Employers believe myths about older workers Ageism in recruitment is rarely explicit. It is more likely to surface through assumptions about “fit”: that someone with 30 years’ experience will not want to report to a younger manager, will struggle with new technology or will leave soon anyway. Sometimes the discomfort may work the other way too, with a younger manager uneasy about managing someone the age of a parent. Lucy Fowler, director and co-founder of RecruitAbility, has spent 30 years in recruitment. She says one of the biggest barriers facing candidates over 50 is “the assumptions made before anyone has actually spoken to them”. “They can be labelled ‘overqualified’, assumed to want too much money, be less adaptable or unlikely to stay,” she says. But not everyone over 50 is looking for the next step up. Some actively want less responsibility or a better work-life balance, and employers can find themselves gaining someone with far more experience than they might normally attract at that level. “Rather than seeing ‘overqualified’ as a risk, sometimes it should be seen as an opportunity,” Fowler says. A useful question for recruiters is brutally simple: would I be making the same assumption about this candidate if they were 38 or 42? The financial consequences of being pushed out early are considerable. Losing work at 58 does not simply mean losing a monthly salary. Pension contributions stop. Savings intended for retirement may have to be used years earlier than planned. Mortgage payments, council tax and energy bills do not disappear because the labour market has decided you are approaching retirement. What you, your manager and colleagues can do to help If we genuinely expect people to work longer, employers have to start treating later working life as a real phase of a career, not merely the waiting room for retirement. That also means continuing to invest in experienced employees. Fidelity found that only 43 per cent of workers aged 55 to 64 had participated in job-related training, compared with 57 per cent of those aged 25 to 54. There is a dangerous circularity here. Employers invest less because somebody is assumed to be nearing retirement. Their skills become less current, and that can later be used as evidence that they are less employable. But responsibility does not rest entirely with employers. Career development should not stop once we become established. We need to keep an eye on how our occupations and industries are changing, notice which skills are becoming more valuable and which are becoming less so, maintain relationships beyond our immediate employer and continue learning before we are forced to. Older workers can also ask for development rather than quietly assuming opportunities are intended for younger colleagues. Why should the only choices be carrying on in exactly the same role until retirement or leaving altogether? There could be more lateral moves, project work, shorter weeks, mentoring, retraining and phased transitions. Managers and colleagues have a role as well. Ageism can slip into apparently harmless remarks: “When are you going to retire?” or “You probably wouldn’t want to learn that new system.” Repeated often enough, they send a message: you belong to the past. But colleagues can do more than watch their language. Visibility matters before someone is at risk, not after: naming a more experienced colleague for a project or putting their name forward for a senior opportunity. Colleagues are often better placed to do this than a manager quietly weighing up headcount. And when an older colleague is made redundant, we should stop assuming retirement is their obvious next step. Someone of 59 may want another senior role, someone else three days a week, another something entirely different. Age tells us remarkably little about ambition, financial need or appetite for work. There are other things individuals can do, although these are protections, not cures. One is financial resilience, thought about long before we need it. A promotion can lead almost imperceptibly to a more expensive lifestyle: the better car, bigger holidays, higher monthly commitments. There is nothing wrong with enjoying what we earn. But the more of a salary that becomes committed expenditure, the harder an unexpected job loss becomes to absorb, and the less room there is to search properly, retrain or take a lower-paid role without destabilising your life. And perhaps we also need to build identities that are not carried entirely by work. In a recent LinkedIn discussion about unemployment, one user described how the refrain “I can’t find work” can gradually become “I don’t know who I am anymore”. Others talked about the shock of discovering that a working life they had assumed would continue had simply ended. Work carries far more than income. It can give us structure, status, belonging, social contact and a sense of usefulness. When it disappears unexpectedly, the loss can therefore be far greater than a salary. This is becoming more complicated as artificial intelligence reshapes many professional roles. Telling a 60-year-old simply to “retrain” means little if the occupation they retrain for is itself becoming insecure. The bigger flaw in the “longer working lives” narrative is that it assumes the opportunities will be there. They may not be. Government policy matters, and we need serious action on age discrimination, training and employment support. Individuals can stay alert, adaptable, connected and financially resilient, and colleagues can choose to sponsor rather than sideline. None of that is wasted effort. But it is not a substitute for employers questioning the assumptions they make about people in their fifties and sixties, because no amount of individual resilience fixes a labour market that has already decided who counts as finished. A longer working life is meaningless without a labour market capable of accommodating one. If we expect people to work until at least 67, the very least we can do is stop treating them as finished at 55. Dr Denise Taylor is a chartered psychologist and author who writes about later life, work and meaning beyond full-time employment. Her latest book, ‘ThriveSpan: Walking Gently Into What Matters Now‘, is out now