Carry on Working
Two surveys out today offer encouraging news for those who love their jobs and dread the thought of retirement. A joint report by Help the Aged and Age Concern says that 60% of people surveyed thought they would have to delay their retirement due to deficits in their pension. And a Financial Times survey found that 60% of people would support working beyond state retirement age in order to receive a bigger pension.
Now, all this is fine for people who love their jobs or are so active that they have no desire to retire. But what about those (sadly in Career Energy’s experience the majority of the working population) who are bored, frustrated, undermotivated or depressed at work? How will they cope with five or ten more years of work?
It all comes back to the key value that we promote at Career Energy. Everyone should be able to work in a job that they enjoy. The only reason that most people do not is because of an absence of effective career planning at critical moments in the life cycle. People do not plan their careers because our educational and social systems do not formally allow for this; apart from possibly one or two low level discussions with a career adviser at school or college, most people have never sat down and considered in a structured way what they want from their careers.
So if we are going to work longer then we need proper systems in place to ensure that we will be working in careers we enjoy, in which we are more productive, more motivated and are making a greater contribution to the national economy. It is a task for the goverment but it also requires a change in the way we see the role of our careers in our lives.
But won’t happen by itself. Change has to start at at home. By taking the first steps ourselves to planning a more engaging career, we can raise the debate on career satisfaction to a more prominent level, so that effective, formal career planning processes are put in place, if not for for our generations then certainly for the next.
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Tags: Ageism, Career Advice, Career Adviser, Career Change, Career Energy, Career Planning, Pensions, Retirement
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