Here comes the 60-year career

As people live longer, healthier lives, the traditional 40-year career will become a thing of the past. Hope you like work, kids!

IF YOU THINK working for 40 years before retiring sounds long, what about 50? What about the idea of a 60-year career?

With longevity researchers convinced that people have much higher chances of living longer (with at least one saying that someone born within the last five years has “a 50 per cent chance of living to be a hundred”), the idea of careers that extend well into one’s 70s, or even their 80s, is no longer that farfetched.

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A recent Wall Street Journal piece built around gerontologist John Rowe, himself 82, laid out what that career might look like. The old three-act model (school, work, retirement) is cooked, it argues. In its place is something messier, full of pivots, reinventions and time off “built in rather than treated as failures.”

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In Canada, the data shows careers already getting longer. StatsCan reports that labour force participation among those 65 and older hit a record 15.2 per cent in 2025, and the average retirement age is now a record 65.4 years. But a long career is a choice for some and a necessity for others: in 2022, almost half of working Canadians aged 65 to 74 were doing so by necessity, StatsCan found.

“When we are talking about the 60-year career, we are talking about educated people at higher income levels,” Rowe said. “They have more assets and opportunities.”

In other words, knowledge workers, and affluent ones at that. And as WSJ pointed out, employers make it harder with age: they “rarely offer sabbaticals or internships for older workers,” and landing a traditional corporate role late in a career “remains notoriously difficult.”

Others are on board. Lynda Gratton of the London Business School noted we encourage adventure at 20 but discourage it at 40 and 50. Michael Clinton, author of Longevity Nation, told Yahoo Finance the window for taking chances is longer now. “At 60, you can start a new career for 10 or 20 years if you choose to,” he said. “You can become an entrepreneur. You can go back to school. You can start a creative life and become a painter, writer, whatever. It’s this enormous gift of additional time.”

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But if you’re not convinced, and would love to just put your feet up, rest assured you’re not alone. Denise Taylor, a career psychologist, has watched the 60-year-career talk pile up and questions the motives, and whether those pushing it realize that 60 years of exploration and discovery could also mean 60 years of toil.

“I keep hearing this phrase everywhere, from politicians, economists, career advisors, pension experts, all talking about the 60-year career as if it’s a self-evident fact of modern working life,” she wrote. “But nobody seems to define what they actually mean.”