Rewire, Not Retire
Last week, a friend mentioned that the professional services firm she works in has a mandatory retirement at 60 for partners. For many in consulting, it’s a finish line which is met with some relief, given the intensity of getting there.
The conversation stuck with me, not just because at 60 and as someone who very much wants to continue working, she is one of the many people of that age who have another two decades of productive life ahead of them, maybe more. But when she walks out of the door of her firm, so will all of that hard won judgment: from how to navigate a difficult client conversation to how to read a room and when to escalate and when to let something breathe.
The rationale for early retirement is tidy: we need to make room so the next generation can step up. The effect is wasteful. At 60, many partners are at the peak of their knowledge and practice, knowing how things truly get done. And consulting firms aren’t the only ones who see late careerists leave in a way which seems to disregard the rich capability they still have to offer.
Dr Eliza Filby talks about intergenerational learning, the knowledge that can only be transferred through working alongside someone, not reading about it.
This is what these partners and senior practitioners across all types of business have in abundance: the ability to balance egos, navigate conflict and keep culture intact when the pressure is on. It is the quiet competence that makes complex work look simple and it is a classic case of apprenticeship learning: knowledge accumulated through decades of seeing what works and what doesn't.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the career spectrum, we read regularly of an emerging crisis for early careerists.
Across all industries, firms are deploying AI to do the entry level tasks familiar to anyone in the first years of work. The problem is that while the drafting, analysis, research gets done, the learning and practice which built familiarity with how and why systems work or fail, is being lost. It is this very process which builds the intuition, knowledge and cultural savviness which make the difference between success and failure.
Looking at these two problems side by side, there's an obvious solution staring back at us. The people leaving have exactly what the people starting need. Instead of retiring expertise, we could be recycling it. A deliberate exchange - structured, reciprocal, purposeful – would benefit both as well as the organisation they work in.
Few organisations make this link and fewer still understand that this kind of exchange requires deliberate design to work. Many people approaching retirement have spent decades being an expert, a doer or decision-maker. Moving into a coaching or facilitating role - which is what knowledge transfer actually requires - is a different skill entirely. It's the same pivot needed for non-executive director or trustee roles, where the expert needs to morph into someone who helps others get to the solution. It is a transition which requires support and, frankly, some rewiring: co-mentoring rather than reverse mentoring.
What really burns here isn't just the issue of frittering away of capability when people retire early.
It's the reminder of how poor we are at designing systems that look after the talent we invest in. We hear organisations declare people are their greatest asset. We spend time and money attracting talent, building capability and sweating about retention. And at the same time we live with processes that let that same talent quietly drain out.
For mid-career professionals who need flexibility, working parents, people returning from maternity leave and carers, our systems are sieves, leaking value. And with AI, we're creating another hole which doesn’t just remove work, but also take away the human learning that came with it.
The tragedy isn't the loss of talent itself. It's that we keep making these choices by default rather than by design.
We let people walk out into retirement because "that's how it works." We lose parents because flexibility feels too complicated. We allow AI to strip out learning pathways because efficiency looks like progress. None of this is inevitable. It's just that we don't step back and ask ourselves what the actual net loss or gain is from a people and talent perspective.
The real point from what my friend said about retirement is the reminder that long and complicated working lives are now a feature of our workforce, not an exception. We have different demands from our working lives and they are still evolving. As a result, legacy ideas about careers running neatly from first job to retirement are out of step with reality.
The organisations that figure out how to make those careers work through deliberate design won't just retain talent, they'll be the ones who actually know how to build capability when their competitors are still wondering where it all went.
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