Forget retirement: Why more organisations should offer returnship programs

We need to start thinking differently about older workers. The growing trend towards “returnships” is a great start.

According to a report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, with average life expectancies approaching 100 years, if people are pushed out of the workforce at 50 because of discrimination, negative attitudes and the absence of pathways to retrain, they could be staring down the barrel of 50 years without paid work.

It’s concerning, especially for women who already retire with super balances 23 per cent smaller than men, as data from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) tells us. But it’s also a worry for businesses.

By 2050, the Human Rights Commission says around one-quarter of all Australians will be 65 and over, with the proportion of younger Australians declining.

Returnships are programs geared towards experienced, late-career professionals looking to rejoin the workforce after an extended absence.

More than a third of Fortune 50 companies now offer returnships, with organisations such as Amazon getting in on the act.

When we reach the pointy end of our careers, we’re conditioned to think that retirement is the next phase of our lives. We hit our 50s, and there’s the sentiment: do we really want to be doing this? Shouldn’t we be enjoying our lives or stepping aside and letting other people come up and have the opportunity?

There can be pressure where people are pushed out rather than being appreciated for their experience. According to research from the University of South Australia’s Centre for Workplace Excellence, if you lose your job after 50, you are in the hardest age bracket to find a new one.

This issue is a personal one for me because a close friend of mine recently retired. She was a career woman – a lawyer for big corporations – and didn’t retire entirely by choice. Rather, she felt she was being nudged.

The experience led her to believe she didn’t have a place in the business world. Companies won’t hire her. She’s too old and too expensive. She’s only 63.

She’s since taken some consulting gigs, but now she’s at a crossroads. She’s bored.

It’s also triggering in my line of work as an advertising strategist. The advertising strategist Mark Pollard recently shared a social post claiming, “Many strategy careers dry up in the 40s,” which hit a nerve since I’m 39.

I took almost half a decade off to raise my two babies. I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride, and now you’re telling me I’ve only got a decade left. I still see myself as being relevant, but this idea of an expiry date has made me self-conscious about my age. When I hit 50, will I find myself out of a job and looking at ways to re-enter the workforce?

The reality is we need people of all ages in our business. We develop advertising strategies to appeal to people at different life stages, and you need lived experience to do that successfully. To give you an example, we recently did some work looking at the purchase process for replacing kitchen appliances.

We talked about the frustration when things break down because it’s an expense you don’t anticipate on top of your mortgage and day-to-day household expenses. For the younger people in the room, there was a sense that if it breaks down, just replace it. If you’re renting or living at home with your parents, that’s a fair point. But it’s not the only answer. You need diversity of thought to understand all the perspectives of consumers.

And that need for diversity of thought applies across most industries.

When my friend was in-house counsel at a bank, she helped a customer in his 80s who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars after falling victim to a scammer. Because his password didn’t comply with requirements – perhaps it was lacking a special character or an uppercase letter – he wasn’t covered by insurance. Younger members of the team believed, given the customer’s age, he didn’t really need the money, while my friend argued these were life savings he was likely squirrelling away for his children – his legacy.

When you have people with different perspectives, it opens your eyes and your mind.

So, instead of focusing solely on recruiting university grads, why not introduce a returnship program that taps into the experience and wisdom of older generations?

Build a bridge for the transfer of knowledge from seasoned professionals to the younger workforce. This knowledge transfer will help prevent the loss of valuable insights that could remain trapped within the organisation’s retiring workforce, all while fostering a culture of continuous learning.

My friend is far from an isolated case. By creating that path, we’ll prevent countless amounts of knowledge from going to waste while investing in diverse thinking.

If you’ve already got a returnship program, I’ve got just the candidate.

By Laura Agricola, strategy director at PR and creative agency Keep Left.