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It’s very interesting to look at how different societies are responding to the changing age of their populations.  Some societies, with a rapidly growing young population, are responding to the challenge of providing futures for younger people by introducing lower retirement ages.  In other societies, where they have got fewer younger people coming through, they’re responding to the challenge of an ageing population with delays in retirement age.  Even those societies with lots of young people are starting to move towards longer retirement ages.  The overall trend across high-income developed Western countries, is to extend the retirement age significantly.  If I give you some examples, you will see that in the UK and in the USA, in Germany and in Japan, those ages are continuing to extend.

What does retirement age mean in different societies?

I would suggest, there are 3 kinds of retirement age.

There is the age at which you’re eligible for a state pension.  That is a matter of law and tax or benefit policy.

Then there is the age within particular professions, when retirement is either required or expected.  So traditionally, professions like the police, teachers, nurses and doctors, and the armed forces have worked on the model that you do 25 or 30 years of service, and then you’re eligible for a pension.  At that point, they’re expecting that a very large proportion of the workforce at that age will move on.

Finally, there’s what you might call the social retirement age.  This is the age at which there is the expectation by employers and by employees, that they will stop permanent salaried employment.  This is a much more difficult retirement age to assess, and again, it does vary enormously by sector and profession.

A lot of professional services firms used to implement a policy that partners were forced to retire in the mid-fifties, although that’s probably no longer legal, their internal structures, and the way they reward and motivate partners often still create a natural transition where partners do retire between 55 years and 65 years of age.

However, more generally across the piece, there is a culture where people who are doing manual and physical labour often find the activity so gruelling that by the time they reach their fifties, or perhaps a little bit older they no longer want, and their body no longer supports, the level of physical activity that’s expected of them, and at that point, they often leave the industry through sickness or ill health.

The final area is within professional people working either in local governments or in the national government, in charities or in business, where, as they get older, the whole culture of the business assumes that they will leave. Indeed, typically there will be no further promotion available to them beyond 55.  You see a set of people who are in a career cul-de-sac who are just waiting to leave.  This can be particularly pernicious within schools where the structure of reward within schools tends to make older, more experienced, often more valuable teachers, increasingly expensive and ultimately unaffordable.  As they get to their higher grades and are doing less pupil-facing work they will tend to get reorganised out of a job.

So, trends in retirement age are often subtle, complicated, and intangible.

State Retirement Age

The state retirement age, the point at which you get a state pension, is at least well defined, and this chart of some of the state retirement ages across a sample of countries, will give you some of the indications of where things are going.  (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age for full list)

How are You going to Respond

The overall trend is for the state retirement age to be delayed but this is not reflected in the attitude of employers towards older workers.  With some think tanks suggesting a state retirement age delayed into your 70s, but employers denying opportunities to those in their mid-50s, I believe you need to take radical control of your future working life.  Only by actively planning your 2^nd Half Career will you enjoy the Freedom and Joy you deserve as you move into older age.  Check out http://2ndhalfcareer.com to see more.

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.