For more than a century, what demographers call “best-practice life expectancy” has increased at the remarkable rate of two to three years every decade. That means that a child born today in a developed country has more than a 50 per cent chance of living past 100. In fact, people aged over 100 are already the fastest growing demographic group in the world. While this is good news for individuals, there are significant implications for every aspect of society and the environment. In 2019, we will work out ways to respond to the challenges of our ageing societies.
Longevity has profound implications for our personal economics. Unless we have saved more than 25 per cent of our income through our working lives (which few of us do), it is probable that we will be working into our 70s or 80s. Yet, under the conditions of the traditional “three-stage life” (full-time education followed by full-time employment followed by full-time retirement) that will prove to be virtually impossible. Instead we will need to start living a “multistage life”, with much more time out – for sabbaticals and periods of retraining – and many more transitions from one job to another.
This new way of structuring life is already beginning to emerge. People in their 30s are taking time out to explore their options and change the way they work. Those in their 40s and 50s are seeking to build a more fluid, portfolio way of working, and some are becoming entrepreneurs. People in their 60s and 70s are being forced to engage with the idea of working for the next ten to 20 years.
However, the institutional barriers they face are significant. Corporations tend to favour graduate recruitment and are ill-equipped to hire people in mid-career. Educational institutions are strongly focused on young adults and find it hard to integrate the over-30s. And many governments still base their policies for housing and social support on the three-stage-life framework.
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In 2019 we will find more ways to resolve this conflict between individuals who are pioneering a more flexible way of living and the “cultural lag” of institutions that they interact with.
In the workplace, alternative ways of earning a living, particularly freelance work, are flourishing – jobs that are capable of delivering greater autonomy, which will be crucial for making a multi-stage life fulfilling. And corporations are already exploring ways to make work more flexible and to counter age stereotypes (which, in my view, have been shocking) and retain employees over the age of 60.
Traditional educational establishments are struggling with life-long learning, but online Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) are flourishing. Today, around 78 million people are learning this way and that number is growing by 20 million every year. Organisations such as General Assembly, which runs work-related technology courses, are enabling students to learn new skills in as little as 12 weeks, opening up the possibility of many educational breaks throughout the working life.
And LinkedIn Learning, built through LinkedIn’s acquisition of the online training business Lynda, will increasingly deliver content curated to suit an individual’s working profile. Most importantly, these programmes are age-agnostic – anyone of any age can take them.
Government response has been slow, but, not surprisingly, it is currently led by Japan, where 27 per cent of the population is over 65, half is over 50 and deaths have exceeded births for more than a decade. The country is promoting a narrative that focuses on the positives rather than the negatives of longevity.
Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe has assembled and personally chaired a council of ministers, business leaders, union representatives and academics (including myself) to develop policy proposals that will enable people to flourish across the whole of their longer lives. It has called for a range of measures including significant improvements in long-term care workers’ pay and a dramatic expansion of lifelong learning to support mid-career employment and enable people to work into their 70s and 80s.
In 2019, other countries will follow Japan’s lead. And, instead of relying on technological determinism to inform us about how we should see the future, we will realise that it is demography that has the most profound impact on shaping the context in which we live.
Lynda Gratton is a professor of management practice at London Business School and co-author of The 100-Year Life
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
