Forget the job for life: let’s hear it for the grey trainees

Last week a financial adviser paid me a visit to talk about my pension. Until that minute I had fondly thought retirement was a longish way off, yet the meeting opened with this man declaring that I’m at (early) retirement age already.

In theory I could start taking a pension in a few weeks’ time, when I turn 55.

This has brought on an existential crisis. How can my career be almost at an end when I haven’t figured out yet what I want to be when I grow up? I have about 20 years of work left in me, which ought to be plenty of time to begin all over again at something quite different.

When I started out in journalism I was 24, and was recovering from an unsuccessful starter career at JPMorgan. I had no idea if I would like the life of a hack any more than the life of a banker, but thought I’d give it a try.

I did like it. I do like it. Which is why I’m still doing it 30 years later.

You could say this was a happy story. I’m lucky to have found something that suits me so well. Yet this model of a professional career – in which we stumble into something in our 20s and end up doing it for the rest of our lives – was always a poor one, and is becoming even poorer. It was a stretch when a career lasted 40 years but now that most of us will work for 50 years or more, it makes no sense at all.

Many of my contemporaries who have ploughed the same furrow for more than a quarter of a century really ought to be doing something else by now. Most are less keen on their jobs than they were 10 years ago; some are screamingly bored. But instead of changing, they cling on, preventing others from having a go. The system serves no one.

Shift sideways

So what can they do instead? Some shift sideways into related activities. Publishers become literary agents; journalists (God help them) go into PR; solicitors become judges.

Others “go portfolio”, doing a bit of this and a bit of that – a non-exec post here, a bit of charity work there. Some start their own businesses, go freelance or turn a hobby into a job. I know one former lawyer who has become a photographer. And an ex-teacher who is a writer.

If you type into Google “new career at 55”, you are presented with a list of occupations that welcome elderly trainees, but none is quite what I had in mind. Care worker, anyone? Private detective? Tour guide? Shrink?

The only thing you can’t do in your 50s is pretend you are 22 all over again.

Yet I really don’t see why not. Why shouldn’t I be considered for the sort of jobs that I fancied as a graduate: the civil service, advertising, the oil industry – or banking? If JPMorgan would have me back – I’m not asking, I’m just saying – I’d be a far better prospect now than the sneering waster they employed 32 years ago.

Big employers insist on filling entry-level jobs with graduates mainly because they are cheap and they are keen.

But grey trainees need be no more pricey. Professional people in their 50s could afford to start at the bottom of the pay scale if they had paid off the mortgage and the children were gone.

Keen as mustard

They would also be keen as mustard. If I changed career now, with a finite amount of time left to learn new skills, I would put my back into it like never before.

Without competition from the pram in the hall, even long hours would be less painful. And with child-rearing behind us, men and women– for the first time ever – would start out truly equal.

For new graduates it might seem like the last straw having to compete with these elderly trainees – but even for them the scheme need not be all bad. They would meet fewer logjams later on, and would eventually enjoy two careers themselves.

Convinced of the brilliance of the idea, I have paid a visit to the man at the FT who is in charge of hiring, and asked why we don't have a grey trainee scheme for fiftysomething lawyers/executives/bankers who want to do something
new.

Funny you should raise that, he said. He had recently been approached by a 52-year-old hedge fund manager who proceeded to talk himself into a job.

This ageing novice sits on the floor below mine surrounded by younger journalists. He knows less than them in some ways; more in others. He has only been at it a couple of months, but so far, so good.

Most of his friends, he tells me, think he was insane to consider such a financially catastrophic move, and even the FT took a lot of convincing.

But I don’t think he’s insane at all. I think he’s made one of the wisest job moves I’ve ever heard of. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014)