Authors
The IFoA’s new Longevity Bulletin explores how longer lifetimes are reshaping society. Here the editor, Michael Anderson, FIA C.Act, touches on some of the themes the bulletin explores.
Increasing life expectancies are something to be celebrated. They offer the potential for people to enjoy longer and more fulfilling careers, to spend more time with family and friends and to have more time to spend on favourite pastimes and hobbies.
At a societal level, longer careers allow for greater development of knowledge and experience and therefore, with the right investment, greater productivity and innovation. But achieving the potential benefits on offer will require a very different approach to many aspects of life than those which we are currently used to.
Shifting attitudes around career journeys
One key example is the career path that we are expected to follow. As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott point out in their book ‘The 100 Year Life’, longer lifespans make the traditional linear approach of learning and training early in life, followed by a sustained period of work and then retirement impractical.
Skills and knowledge will become obsolete over longer timeframes and new ones will need to be learned. Some may prefer to change careers (perhaps more than once) if they will be working for 50 years or more. This will mean a need for training interludes in middle life, perhaps as a full career break and return to full time study. Others will need flexibility for family reasons at different points in time, to accommodate childcare and elder care, depending on their personal circumstances.
A career will therefore likely switch between full-time work, part-time work and periods of unemployment over the course of a working lifetime and this will need to be seen as a positive approach to managing priorities, rather than suggesting a lack of commitment or inconsistency.
In addition, the current expected pattern of generally increasing seniority over time will need to give way to a more variable path. This will require a change of attitude in terms of what career success means, as well as more creative ways of assessing performance and setting compensation.
We will also need to ensure that there is a more welcoming employment market for older people, especially those returning to employment after a break for family or training reasons. If nothing else, as the population ages, this will be of necessity as well as being the right thing to do.
Seniority in an organisation will need to become even more linked to the skills, knowledge and broad experience that someone can bring to the role, with less focus on ‘time served’ in a particular role, or even in a particular industry.
This would be a positive development all round, with potentially greater opportunities for career progression and the possibility of greater innovation and development, with the transfer of ideas and techniques across boundaries that are currently treated as more rigid.
Prioritising health and prevention
Healthcare will need to become more of a priority, with the emphasis being on maintaining good health over longer expected lifetimes. This naturally will lead to more of a focus on prevention, rather than treatment, which is what most healthcare systems are currently geared towards.
Not only will this be beneficial from a wellbeing point of view, through reducing the amount of time that people spend in poor health, but it will also help manage the cost of healthcare provision. Older people tend to need more healthcare, all things being equal, and so minimising this need will be an important part of managing the costs typically associated with an older population. Without this type of new approach, government spending may become fiscally unsustainable, which would necessitate painful spending cuts.
Reviewing these thoughts indicates that some of the changes required to reap the potential benefits of longer lifespans will be not only far reaching, but also disruptive and possibly costly in the short term.
For example, while transitioning to a more preventive healthcare system, treatment will still need to be provided to those who need it (that is, those who have not yet benefited from preventive approaches). However, delaying the necessary changes will only add to the costliness of the transition: longer lifetimes are already here and are set to become even more impactful as time passes.
Explore more in the Longevity Bulletin
The 2026 edition of the Longevity Bulletin is now available and explores these themes and more in greater detail. Demography is a powerful force that impacts the economy, society and each of our lives, but since it changes more gradually it is often ignored.
But life expectancies have already increased significantly, and ever greater numbers of people are surviving well into their 80s and beyond. We all need to consider how to harness these changes so that they can be a positive development, rather than a source of greater burdens to society.