How Increasing Longevity Transforms The Meaning Of Graduation And Career

The beat of Pomp and Circumstance is playing across the country this month. From high schools to colleges, young people are graduating in commencement ceremonies. Commencement is about celebrating the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Life is a series of chapters, and now that our lifespans are increasing, there are more and different chapters to be lived. One of those is the idea of a career.

From toddlerhood to young adulthood, we are asked — “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Responses range widely. Young children often cite dreams of being a fireman, dancer, ball player, doctor, construction worker, etc. Many dreams come true, and others morph into more definitive professions shaped by interests, abilities, and opportunities. I thought I wanted to be an immunologist in eighth grade. As you can tell from this writing, paths change.

The problem with the question is the underlying assumption of a singular response. Our societal notion of career needs to be updated. As lifespans close in on 100 years, a new question should be asked — “How many things will you be when you grow up?”

Nearly half of the high schoolers and college students graduating this year are forecasted to live almost 100 years. That means many of them have 80-plus years ahead of them.

Think of the changes that have occurred over the last 80 years. Technology changes nearly every year, let alone the tech revolutions we have witnessed in the previous eight decades. With technology changes, some professions ebb and end while others emerge and evolve. Does anyone remember the ‘typing pool?’ When did a ‘social media specialist’ become a thing?

Tech may be the most visible disrupter of professions and careers, but it is not alone. Over the last 80 years, globalization has shipped jobs once found in paper and textile mills halfway across the world. Entire supply chains of car and electronics plants now span the globe rather than fuel the economy of a single region. In the wake of those moves, many people were left without the careers they had planned to build a home, a family, and a life around.

Beyond technology and globalization, structural changes within industries have changed the well-laid plans of countless professionals. For example, the rise of the paraprofessional has even disrupted highly revered and well-paid professions. Physicians now see big box stores provide services with nurse practitioners once offered only by primary care doctors. Likewise, clients are no longer willing to pay the hourly rates attorneys charge for tasks that lower-cost paralegals can perform.

A longer life means all of us, especially this year’s graduating students, must be prepared to be many things over a lifetime. This begins with but is not limited to, parents, institutions, employers, and workers themselves.

Parents

Parents must begin teaching their tots and teens that a career is no longer a single profession. Children must be prepared for a world of constant change, some planned, some unplanned. Given the sheer velocity of change in our lives, from tech to geoeconomics, we must educate our children (and ourselves) to anticipate, survive, and thrive in a high-velocity world. The storied promise of career stability over decades of work, handed down to us by a generation and a time long gone, is no longer valid. What things (note the plural) you might want to do with your life is a more apt question to ask our children and vital to preparing them for the decades ahead.

Institutions

Institutions must prepare young people to learn for a lifetime—not just for one profession that may be in high demand today but fade tomorrow. No profession, even those in STEM, is immune to change. Even computer programmers are discovering they are now competing with AI-written code.

Educational institutions, in particular, are vital to ensuring that today's graduates remain productive, competitive, and resilient for many, many decades to come. The changing meaning of career means that school is never out and learning is never done. Education institutions, from high schools to trade schools to colleges, must adapt to an era of longer lives and the ever-shorter half-life of skills and knowledge. Education must become a revolving door for all age groups to enable people to refresh or completely reengineer individual capabilities to ensure professional competitiveness over a half-century plus of work. Today’s assembly line approach to education with a clear beginning and end in two or four years might jumpstart a career, but it is not likely to sustain a lifetime of work. Educational institutions at every level will need to continuously develop new future-ready curricula, introduce ageless teaching styles and venues, and be responsive to market change by forging strong partnerships with employers.

Employers

Employers must rethink how they will adapt to a workforce that will be far more age-diverse and fluid. Consider the following:

• Internships, new hires, and orientation programs redesigned to welcome, leverage, and retain the talents of freshly minted 20-somethings and the “new kid,” who might actually be a 50 or 60-something who has just changed professions.
• Increased investment in employer-based training to ensure that workers of all ages can adapt to changes in technology and industry dynamics.
• Redesign of employer retirement benefits and financial services industry innovation to provide new products, services, and longevity advice to manage the complexity of a work-life comprised of multiple professions, many jobs, several employers, and income dynamics that do not coincide with our current assumptions of age, life stage, career, and wealth building.

Workers

Next-generation workers must adjust expectations and behaviors that may be rooted in tradition but no longer fit in an economy that will morph many times in a lifetime.

For example, age or years of work experience may not necessarily correlate with role or compensation. A 58-year-old who is changing careers and new to a profession may look to their 28-year-old supervisor for mentorship. Similarly, the young supervisor may seek someone with life experience to provide insights into how best to manage a multigenerational team in a large, complex organization.

On a related note, employees may need to be prepared for compensation based on their relevant skills and work, not necessarily the years they have worked. A constantly changing work life may look more like zigging and zagging up and down an organization and from one industry to another rather than assuming that a career follows a historic societal narrative that is becoming rapidly obsolete of a single profession with an upward ladder of income and position over time.

The next 80 years will see even more and faster change than the last eight decades. Change that will disrupt what you are today, what you think you want to be, and what you will be tomorrow.

Congratulations Graduates! We can’t wait to see the people you will become and the things you will do. Over what might be 100 good years, let the many things you do be rewarding, meaningful, and good.

Want to learn more? Follow me on LinkedIn @drjoecoughlin and subscribe to my newsletter, #LongevityEconomy, as I explore the impact of changing demographics and behavior on business, government, and society.

An earlier version of this article was published in Forbes.