By Sarah Bird
As organisations seek to reshape and reinvent their workforces, there’s a danger in treating older workers as less valuable or desirable. But a new approach to storytelling could help employers to make better use of the resources they already have and empower their midlife employees, according to Sarah Bird.
Even before veteran British singer and songwriter Sir Rod Stewart took to the stage for the Legends slot at the renowned Glastonbury festival this year, there was media noise around his age. At 80, Stewart is one of the oldest artists to perform at the festival but was spared from meeting any of the two in five survey participants who said Glastonbury would be better with fewer older attendees.[1] Indeed, older festival goers may have preferred not to know that more than one in three people think a 60-year-old is too old to jump around in a mosh pit (36%) or crowd surf (39%).
Even the World Health Organization has admitted ageism is a global challenge, declaring that every second person in the world is ageist[2]. In the UK alone, over 50s will probably represent half of the country’s workforce by 2030[3].
Macroeconomics, geopolitical uncertainties, and financial flux are contributing to the necessity to work later in life. For example, the Economic Policy Institute finds that the median retirement account balance for US workers is a mere $10,000[4], while analysis in the US shows that the share of Americans aged 65 and older who remain in the workforce has reached historic highs.[5]
It is ironic that experience, which is so essential when your career is starting out, suddenly becomes a negative burden later in life. And yet, the “old and expensive” tag is far too simplistic and outdated in a market that plans to prioritise reskilling and upskilling in the next five years.[6]
Midlife workers—whether that’s late 40s, 50s and even 60s as childcare demands and pension ages slip—are often more loyal[7], good leaders and communicators[8], and are considerably healthier, physically and mentally, than they were five years ago. A survey from the International Monetary Fund[9] found that a person aged 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive function as the average 53-year-old in 2000. Also, physical health has significantly improved; 70-year-olds boasted the same fitness as 56-year-olds 25 years ago based on grip strength and lung functionality tests.
Refreshing the workforce
As organisations seek to reshape and reinvent their workforces, there’s a danger in choosing to throw out older workers (rather than the baby) with the bathwater. Here’s some of the ways employers could dispel ageism and make the best of the resources they already have:
Embrace a radical rethink of existing employment models: Midlifers’ strengths lie in many of the top 10 core skills identified in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025[10]—resilience, flexibility and agility, along with leadership and social influence—and they are well-practised in the hard and soft skills needed to thrive in today’s fluid work environments. Yet competing pressures, such as elderly parents, recalcitrant teenagers or health issues, may mean they want to more finely tune their working future to balance their personal and professional lives.
Through my work with 2B Ready[11] employability courses in the UK we’ve raised the idea of midlifers undertaking “silver internships”; temporary periods of employment for three-, six- or 12-months, to bring much-needed skills and experience to employers at a suitable cost. Whether silver interns complete a one-off project or serve a broad number of departments in a range of tasks within their existing company, the business can benefit from experienced hires and midlifers can contribute their accrued knowledge without age bias.
Encourage employees to reframe their personal/professional development: Recent times have seen dramatic changes in our working practices. Digital technologies and the global pandemic prompted an unprecedented blending of personal and professional lives. As such, it is not a stretch to consider adopting some of the techniques used to address personal challenges within the workplace.
One technique is Narrative Practice, currently applied in the fields of psychotherapy and counselling and based on the partnership of therapists Michael White and David Epston. Narrative Practice uses powerful storytelling to liberate those who feel stuck with thoughts or behaviours that are questionable, inaccurate or simply unhelpful. Through exercises[12], employees can deconstruct their career story and “re-author” their narrative to open the door to rich possibilities and positive progress. This approach could be particularly effective for groups or to support education and training, especially for organisations that want to transform their business.
Update cultural norms to prioritise safety and authenticity: Studies have shown that disengaged employees affect not only company productivity, but also overall GDP[13]. In particular, workplace stress is a significant issue and has led many organisations to look for a more scientific solution to handling stress responses. Dr Stephen Porges is a distinguished American psychologist and neuroscientist whose research on the Polyvagal Theory[14] emphasises the role the autonomic nervous system plays—especially the vagus nerve, a superhighway that connects the heart, lungs, upper digestive tract, and other organs of the chest and abdomen—in regulating health and behaviour. He describes how safety, co-regulation, and connection are essential to a healthy human experience. For this reason, neuroscientist and coach Delphine Dépy Carron, who co-runs the Institute of Neuroscience for the Transformation of Organisations (INTO)[15], focuses on informing workforces about the vagus nerve as she helps them to better harness their stress responses in periods of transformational change. Fostering an environment where safety and authenticity are actively encouraged goes beyond cultural platitudes to help workers thrive in a more collective and connected way.
Perception matters, so let’s tell a new story about midlifers in the workforce that focuses on the words, not the number.
Sarah Bird
