Life expectancy is rising, careers are lengthening and the old three-stage model of “education, work, retirement” is starting to look obsolete. As populations age and pension systems strain, workers in their 40s, 50s and beyond are no longer outliers but the backbone of many economies. For employers, this is both a looming challenge and an untapped opportunity. For individuals, it raises a pressing question: how do you not just endure, but thrive at work over a 50-year career?
London Business School has become a focal point for exploring this shift. Drawing on research across psychology, organisational behaviour and economics, its academics and practitioners are rethinking the very architecture of working life: how skills are built and rebuilt, how careers are structured, and how organisations can harness the full potential of a multi-generational workforce.
This article examines the emerging playbook for thriving at work as we live longer. It explores why traditional career paths are breaking down, what it takes to stay employable and engaged into later life, and how both individuals and businesses can redesign work for a world where 70 may be closer to mid-career than to the end.
Rethinking career lifecycles as working lives stretch into our seventies
For much of the 20th century, careers followed a neat arc: education, work, retirement. As lifespans extend and healthy, productive years reach well into our seventies, that three-stage model is quietly collapsing.Instead, working life is becoming a series of evolving chapters, punctuated by reinvention rather than a single, decisive finish line.Mid-life is less a cliff edge and more a crossroads,where professionals in their forties and fifties begin to plan for 30 more years of contribution,not 10. This shift is forcing organisations and individuals to reconsider what “peak performance” looks like, how long it lasts and how people sustain it over decades, not just years.
Careers are likely to resemble flexible portfolios built around learning, experimentation and periodic recalibration. Rather than a linear climb to a single summit, workers are starting to design multi-layered trajectories that can withstand economic shocks, automation and personal change. That means:
- Multiple skill waves – developing new capabilities every decade instead of relying on one qualification for life.
- Planned career pivots – treating industry or role changes as expected transitions, not last-resort escapes.
- Intermittent sabbaticals – using time out to recharge, retrain and reimagine future work.
- Blended work identities – combining employment, advisory roles and entrepreneurial projects across different life stages.
| Traditional Career | Extended Working Life |
|---|---|
| One main profession | Several distinct career chapters |
| Front-loaded education | Continuous, modular learning |
| Retirement at 60-65 | Flexible wind-down in late seventies |
| Promotion as the prize | Varied roles, impact and autonomy |
Building adaptable skills and learning habits for a 60 year career
Careers are no longer linear marathons but a series of sprints, pivots and plateaus that can stretch over six decades. The most resilient professionals treat learning like compound interest: small, regular investments that accumulate into outsized returns. This means designing a personal “learning operating system” rather than relying on occasional courses. Practical habits include blocking weekly time for curiosity, rotating data sources beyond your usual industry, and treating every role change as a deliberate experiment.Many seasoned leaders now build a personal curriculum around three pillars: technical depth, human skills and context awareness-the ability to read shifts in markets, technology and culture before they become obvious.
Crucially, adaptable skills are not fixed assets but renewable ones. Workers who stay relevant mix long-term capabilities-such as strategic thinking and ethical judgment-with agile micro-skills like prompt engineering, data storytelling or remote-team facilitation. Simple,repeatable practices help embed this mindset:
- Set a yearly “skills thesis” – a short statement of what you want to be uniquely good at in 3-5 years.
- Use 70-20-10 learning – 70% on-the-job stretch work, 20% mentoring and peer feedback, 10% formal study.
- Run quarterly retrospectives – review what you learned, what became obsolete, and what to double down on.
- Build a teaching habit – share insights in meetings, internal blogs or lunch-and-learns to lock in knowledge.
| Career Stage | Learning Focus | Key Habit |
|---|---|---|
| First 10 years | Foundations & breadth | Rotate roles and industries |
| Mid-career | Reinvention & depth | Curate a focused skills thesis |
| Later career | Transfer & impact | Mentor, teach and codify expertise |
Designing age inclusive workplaces that unlock multigenerational strengths
Across offices and Zoom screens, four or even five generations now share the same workflows – yet many organisations still design roles, benefits and cultures around a single “ideal worker” in mid‑career. A more future-fit approach treats age as a strategic dimension of diversity, with leaders actively curating spaces where experience and fresh perspective intersect. That means flexible career pathways instead of rigid ladders, learning ecosystems that welcome both a 25-year-old coder and a 62-year-old sales director, and people practices that focus on skills, not stereotypes. When teams are configured with intent, the seasoned manager who has navigated three industry disruptions can sit alongside the digital native who instinctively experiments with new tools, turning potential friction into shared problem-solving power.
Practical architecture matters as much as ideology. From the way meetings are run to how feedback is delivered, small design choices either amplify or mute multigenerational value. Organisations can:
- Pair reverse mentoring with traditional mentoring to create two-way learning loops.
- Offer role redesign and phased transitions instead of binary “full-time or retired” choices.
- Curate cross-age project squads for high-stakes innovation and client work.
- Make benefits modular – from caregiving support to midlife reskilling stipends.
- Audit language in job ads and performance reviews to remove age-coded signals.
| Age-diverse practice | Primary benefit |
|---|---|
| Cross-generational teams | Richer ideas, faster risk-spotting |
| Flexible career paths | Longer, more enduring contribution |
| Two-way mentoring | Continuous upskilling for all ages |
| Modular benefits | Higher engagement across life stages |
Financial and wellbeing strategies to sustain performance over the long haul
Longevity demands not just a bigger pension pot, but a smarter choreography between earning, spending and resting. Think in “chapters” rather than a single linear career: periods of higher income and intensity can be balanced with lower-earning phases that prioritise caregiving, retraining or semi-retirement, without derailing long-term security. This requires deliberate financial design – automating savings, diversifying income sources and treating skills as an asset class in your portfolio. Instead of waiting for burnout as a signal to stop, professionals are increasingly using planned mini-sabbaticals and portfolio careers to smooth the psychological and financial shocks of change.
Protecting stamina over decades also means building daily systems that reduce decision fatigue and preserve cognitive bandwidth. That might include:
- Health as a line item – budgeting for nutrition, sleep tech, therapy or coaching as rigorously as you do for rent.
- Boundary rituals – fixed shutdown times, no-laptop spaces at home, and scheduled recovery days after peak projects.
- Micro-renewal habits – 10-minute walks, breathing exercises between meetings, or “no-meeting mornings” once a week.
- Stress diversification – cultivating non-work identities (volunteering, creative work, community roles) to buffer professional volatility.
| Focus | Weekly Micro-Action |
|---|---|
| Money | Auto-transfer 5-10% of pay rise into long-term savings |
| Energy | Block two “deep work” sessions and one protected recovery block |
| Learning | Invest one hour in future-facing skills or industry trends |
| Purpose | Reflect on alignment between current role and long-term values |
Insights and Conclusions
As lifespans lengthen and traditional career arcs dissolve, the question is no longer how to endure longer working lives, but how to make them worth living.The evidence from London Business School’s research points in a clear direction: those who thrive are the ones who treat their careers less like a single race and more like a series of seasons-each with its own pace, priorities and possibilities.
That shift demands new habits from all sides. Individuals will need to invest in learning as a lifelong discipline, guard their health as carefully as their income and design mid-career transitions rather than drift into them. Organisations, in turn, will have to rethink age as an asset, not a liability, opening up routes for redeployment, reskilling and genuinely flexible work that make use of experience rather than shedding it.
The demographic writing is already on the wall.The real competitive advantage-whether for a country, a company or a 60-year-old professional-is how quickly we adapt to it. Longer lives are coming; whether they translate into longer, better working lives will depend on the choices we make now.
