Lucy Standing

I will start by providing context: this is the first generation of people in their 60+ years who will need to work for longer. The benefit of a longer life is extra years: the downside is we aren’t prepared. The average 45+ year old has a pension shortfall of £117,000 – the only way to meet this need is to work for longer, and yet age discrimination is the most widely acknowledged (even accepted) form of discrimination, making it truly difficult for those mid/later life to prepare for and develop their careers to enable them to sustain a longer working life.

We will then share our own research: more than 4000 people have contributed and shared their thoughts on how to age better at work. We’ve run our own programmes for people 50+ helping them prepare for and transition into roles which greater meet their need to feel they are living their lives more sustainably and with purpose. Everything we do on our programmes is rooted in science and evidence:

– We dispell myths about following passion or needing to love your work, because the evidence is clear that these are feelings that develop over time and are a result of commitment. (R. Vellerand, A Wrzesniewski)

– We encourage and organise job shadowing and work experience because this more than anything has a stronger link with future engagement than job interviews.

– We share insights around human ageing and cognition. We share insights around cystallised vs fluid intelligence and the factors most closely linked to job performance, proving age isn’t a barrier – rather an asset. (B Postelwaite – meta analysis)

Interactivity:

We will ask the audience to engage with the content and share their own feedback. For example when we share results of our survey, we’ll ask the audience to guess which we the most common responses. Using sli.do they only need a mobile phone. They don’t need to download anything (no apps) we simply ask them to visit sli.do enter a code and this will give them access – their results will be linked real time to the slides we are using and they can see the audience guesses – before we reveal the ‘real’ answers.

Finally – our work is entirely not for profit. Not only does an ageing population want to do work with more purpose (the reason for choosing this stream), we as an organisation donate our fees to charities, micro businesses and community interest companies. It is possible to create a consultancy model which enables client organisations to contribute to society. The growing awareness and impact of being socially responsible is something we can also share and demonstrate.

People will leave the session understanding:

1. Our current system for talent management and development is broken.

2. Delegates will leave with a much clearer understanding of the issues facing older workers.

3. Delegates will leave more equipped to know how to better support organisations wanting to do a better job to support their ageing employees.