Do you worry you will get too old to do your job?

[sherbetpips]

I have been on the same career path for the last 20 years and have progressed through to a good (although not senior exec) level. My worry is that it is a sales/marketing job and it doesn't seem an older persons career. Where do old account managers go? Everyone seems to be early 30's to late 40's at most at my level. I keep getting quite panicky at night about how I can diversify my career but I don't want to yet as I love what I do. Does anyone else feel there career has an age limit (models and football players need not comment)...

It's quite hard in most professions to get paid off. I know a lot of people in the nhs who have got older and had seriously bad backs, etc and haven't managed to get early retirement on health grounds. Sick pay lasts for six months full pay, six months half pay. A lot of private sector won't even get that.

Why should you be ambitious to have a job until you're 70? Lots of people don't aspire to be managers. And for those that are managers but then get made redundant, I think it's quite difficult to find another job, as companies don't want to employ older people. Well, judging by two ambitious manager friends of mine who've been made redundant in their 50s.

That job spec looks fairly hands on technically to me - you couldn't do that job if you hadn't touched a line of code for decades, and they're wanting specific technologies.

Agree with Cretaceous though - why should you need to be a manager to work until 70?

I agree that in an ideal world we could all do the jobs we loved doing until we felt we wanted to stop doing them. But we don't live in an ideal world, so we deal with reality. I do love my job (most of the time) but at 60 I am quite ready to retire and do all the other things I would love to do (like my slightly older friends got to do!!) but the world has changed, I can't afford to retire now, I don't get my pension until I'm 66. I've been lucky to have had the opportunity to move into a less stressful role than f/t teaching - but I did the years of f/t teaching in order to get the experience that would fit me for this role - and I spent my spare time getting some other qualifications that would make me a better candidate than my colleagues for promotion.

Life isn't fair - but we still have to deal with what comes along. If my H hadn't fallen for the OW we would still, as a family, have enough money that I could have retired now, but instead I'm working hard to keep the family home. I got this current job 18 months post-divorce and had a couple of years where money was very tight and I took temp and p/t contracts in similar positions to get my face known. When a f/t post came up I was well positioned to take it.

Of course the job I linked to requires someone with recent hands on coding - but it's that kind of job that is the stepping stone out of being a f/t coder into management. Once you have a management position, assuming you are good at it, you can move upwards, sideways, into a related industry, whatever. The crucial thing is to be proactive in getting the skills and experience to do a different kind of job - not sit there worrying about it.

OP I'm in marketing too and have been really worried about this. It's clear, judging by this thread, that it's not just our profession. Although it does attract a lot of young people who think it's glamorous. The issues as I see them are that a) younger people willing to work for a lot less than those with experience and, b) continuous changes in the field can be hard to keep up with.

I'm not sure what the answer is or what will happen, but it's certainly worrying.

I'm in my mid-30s, and I think about this, too.

My manager is in his 50s, but there are people doing my job (same title) who must be in their 50s, too. So I could potentially carry on. However, I am a little more ambitious than that. Aim to move much further up the corporate ladder before retiring though. I would like to be in corporate management one day... one of the people with "Chief" in their title. They are all old. Not sure whether I'll get there, but might as well try.

loiner Okay, I guess I can see why you picked that ad now. I'd agree that it helps to give yourself options - though I'd argue that in IT, the industry seems to be moving towards much flatter hierarchies, so management roles may get harder to find. I'm in a management role currently and thinking that I should aim to ensure I stay hands on enough to jump back in if I need to. Options again. Hard to guess - I'm in my forties, and the way IT has changed in the last thirty years would have been hard to predict back then! Who knows what it'll be like come 2045?

I have to say I was very lucky in starting my career in a niche but prestigious area of my chosen career that has sort of suddenly become "the norm". As a young graduate, I was trained by high calibre people most of today's graduates wouldn't be given access to (they get access to me instead ). Hence, people with my background are (1) scarce and (2) hard to get out of London...

I think community midwifery is quite physical actually, not as much as the hospital of course but I've still had days where my feet ache like hell. I know some community midwives who see 15+women in one clinic and I don't know how they do it, I start to lose the plot after 10. 15-20 min appointments often aren't long enough and we nearly always overrun. I have to go out and get the woman, sit down to look at her notes, get up again to do the palpation, sit down to tap on the computer, get up to sort paperwork out etc. The scales for home visits are so heavy as well, lugging them about isn't fun, especially if someone lives in a flat that isn't on the ground floor, getting them up the stairs can be a nightmare. And there's the on calls as well, you won't do as many deliveries but with home births I'd imagine you will be on the floor most of the time. I worked with a community midwife who had terrible hip problems, she could hardly walk and I felt so sorry for her seeing her struggling to walk up people's steps and when you're doing 7 or 8 visits in a morning and having to get in and out of a car it's more physical than people think. She used to hobble along the road, I used to carry the scales for her but I don't know how she coped on her own.

I know a lot of older midwives work on postnatal ward, although IME that's a more physical job than labour ward normally. My feet are massively swollen by the end of a shift on there. My plan is to get out of the clinical side and do teaching or research, which has always been my long term goal anyway. I've heard about one midwife in her 60s who was experiencing early onset dementia but didn't know it and would walk round in circles or forget why she was there. Scary.

Hello Sherbet

Does it keep me awake no !

The government keeps putting up the state retirement age

In UK I believe companies cannot make you leave work when you reach retirement age, you can ask to stay at work, subject to certain criteria & what sort of job you do (law changed recently)

I think people are lucky if they do a job that they enjoy

Obviously some jobs are more physically demanding than other people do a variety of jobs during their lifetime & there are alot of opportunities to retrain

What about part time or volunteer work ?

I know people who are still working in their 70s & 80s