Professor Martin Hyde Decoding the Future of Work and Retirement

Nigel Rawlins: Martin, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're from?

Martin Hyde: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and talk a little bit about some of the work I've been doing. I suppose some of the kind of general issues that are, occurring within the research around older workers and retirement. So currently I've just changed jobs. So I'm now a professor of work employment at the University of Leicester.

Prior to that, I worked at Swansea University for seven years as an Associate Professor in Gerontology there and prior to that I've worked at a number of other universities in the UK and Europe, but all the way through I've had an interest in issues around work and retirement, given that we are all going to be expected to work for longer in life, and also that the nature of retirement has been changing quite a lot, of the time that I've been researching. So I've been working in academia for over 20 years now. So during that time, we've seen quite radical changes in how we retire, how we think about retirement. The whole concept of retirement even has come under a lot more sort of scrutiny and critical thinking.

So it's been a very exciting time to work on this and that's not going away. I think, all those issues that we've seen emerging are going to be continuing for the foreseeable future. Definitely something for people to be thinking about and hopefully as well when they're doing that to think about what prevailing evidence is to help them guide the right choices they make or to inform what they might want to do as they start to approach that sort of, latter half of life.

Nigel Rawlins: So what would make you want to study gerontology?

Martin Hyde: The common and the true story for me is I got into it by accident. I did my master's degree at a place called Bristol, and I was very interested in how you design questionnaires to find information out from people, and there was a job going in London. And most of my friends had moved to London, so I wanted to go to London.

So there wasn't any great motivation for the job per se, but it seemed interesting. And it was to design a questionnaire to look at quality of life. And it was in the Department of Epidemiology, at Imperial College London, and to give you an impression of my naivety and how little I understood of what I've gone on to research quite a lot of.

I thought epidemiology had stuff to do with the skin rather than the study of diseases. So I turned up and was very fortunate enough to get the job and work with some great people. And through that job, we developed a measure of quality of life, which is called the CASP-19. It's made up of four subscales that measure control, autonomy, self realization, and pleasure.

And it was these last two bits that were really quite radical at the time, because a lot of the research that had looked at quality of life in older adults. Up to that point, I tended to take quite a negative view. So they assumed that quality of life was really synonymous with health, by which they meant poor health or poverty.

And we came at it from a sort of different, more sociological, positive psychology approach and pointed out that people were entering or the people who were entering later life, during this time in the sort of 2000s were very different from previous generations of older adults. They were the front edge of the baby boomers who'd gone through historical changes in terms of health, lifestyle, political activity, cultural identity.

And we're challenging those preconceived ideas around aging. So that very, I look back on it now and feel very privileged to have been involved in such a interesting and quite radical piece of research. And then from that, we went on and did a number of other projects. And the thing that I say about doing research on aging is a lot of people aren't interest in it to start with, because they think it's unsexy.

They think, oh it's again, it's, care home research, or it's poor health. And if you stop and ask the people actually you're researching like 40 years worth of life at the very least, all the changes that happened to people in that time, it's probably one of the most dynamic periods in a person's life.

And as soon as you start to think about aging, you start to see how it interacts and impacts in everything. So it's not just your personal life and your own trajectory as you age and the things that can help you age well and give you a good quality of life or things that can detract from it. Impacts on your family situation, impacts on your housing and your neighborhood, work, politics, the environment.

It's really interconnected with everything. Everything is interconnected with aging, particularly now, as we see populations age around the world. So actually I would challenge people and say, it's a really dynamic and exciting thing to look at. And the research on it is really quite remarkable when you see what people are doing.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, that sounds amazing. I've noticed since I've been in my 60s that my whole attitude to things have changed and I want to keep working and that's why I'm interested in this area is is it possible to keep working into your 80s? So what, what's some of the research that you're finding telling us about aging and the nature of working when you're retirement age or post retirement.

Martin Hyde: So I think one of the first things to start off with is the realization that a lot of what we consider to be retirement age is a relatively modern social construct. Whereas I think it's quite understandable that many people, maybe of my age, I'm in my late forties, or maybe people slightly older than me have gone through their working life with this idea of a fixed period or fixed age at which you retire, because that's what their parents and their grandparents would have done.

So it's almost acquired a status as being like. A natural transition in the life course like puberty, childbirth, menopause, retirement. These are almost seen as biological processes. They become that ingrained. But even a cursory kind of look at a, the range of retirement ages and situations around the world suggest that there's nothing particularly natural or, determined about when we retire.

Or a historical analysis of the emergence of retirement ages in different parts of the world and different countries and what sort of really motivated that. And oftentimes if you do a bit of digging you see that it's tended not to be motivated too much to do with the welfare of older adults, but was often a form of either personal or social control in order to manage the working population, particularly to offset social unrest.

So I think that's the first point, of course, to question why we're stuck on these ages rather than people's ability and performance and functional health and capability, which I think would be a much better way of thinking about. What people can do as their chronological age increases. And again, there's lots of good research that shows that chronological age is a relatively poor indicator of functional age, emotional age even what people call in biological age, so your heart health, your, respiratory health, your muscular health, all these things become more diverse as chronological age increases. And it's definitely the case that some people tend to do worse. We have declines. That's part of that is somewhat normal, but we also have loads of people that are still extremely fit and healthy well into later life and we're seeing more and more of those as well. So again, we've seen real changes in health and being over the last 20 or 30 years.

That said, there is a slight caveat to that, which is there is some disturbing data that started to come out, particularly from the UK and the US, that we're seeing a slowing down of that increase, not just in life expectancy, but in healthy life expectancy. But again, that goes to show that a lot of what we think of as aging as a biological process is actually highly conditioned on the environments in which we live and work being a major part of that.

So one of the big culprits for this slowing down of life expectancy is the cost of living crisis, as well as COVID, obviously, and people struggling more and more to be able to get the things they need in order to have a good and healthy life. My sort of first point of call is to say, what's the criteria on which we're using to judge whether people can continue working until a certain chronological age?

And I would say, actually, it's not chronological age, it's how well people can do their jobs. So that then makes us think, how can we design jobs that allow people to continue working and I mean there's a number of fairly now accepted things that employers can do to make that the case.

One is flexibility. That comes out top of the pack. One of the things that happens, as we age, we tend to acquire more responsibilities. There'll be people who unfortunately have caring responsibilities, both up and down the generation. So what are often called the sandwich generation.

So you're caring for your parents, but you're also caring for children or grandchildren. So that puts a lot of demand on you, but that doesn't mean you can't work. It just means that you need to be able to manage that work time more flexibly. And again, there's lots of good evidence that shows that people who have what is called work time control are able to tend to have better health and are able to have less stress because you can manage the demands placed upon you.

I think the other thing that as well is work can give you lots of good things. I think we have a tendency to focus on the negative side of work, which I can see is completely understandable because there is lots of work stress. I think people, become a bit disenchanted with work. We've seen these, throughout COVID and post COVID, such as we are.

There's been a lot of media attention on quiet quitting. So people who are just dissatisfied with work because they don't feel they get a lot of the rewards, both financial and non financial from work. But when work is good, it does give you those things. So there was a psychologist writing, I think in the 1920s called Marie Holder who talked about the intrinsic value of work.

So you get money, that's obviously important. We need that to live. But work gives you loads of other stuff. It gives you like time structure, social contacts, creative opportunities for creative development. And we've seen some of the value of that in some research we've done so. I think was it last year or the year before last, I published a paper with some excellent colleagues from Sweden that looked at the effect of having worked in jobs that were more cognitively complex over your life on your cognitive ability and being in later life and quite late life.

I think in people's seventies and eighties, because the Swedes have got this amazing data that goes back from many decades. And we were able to show that people that had jobs that had challenged them cognitively and creatively throughout their working life, were the ones who also had high levels of cognitive function in later life.

So if we can get people to have jobs that challenge them, give them new ways of thinking, then they're more able to stay cognitively engaged. And that means they're probably more able to stay able to work if there's opportunities to do that sort of work. So again, job design, I think, is there, there are things that can be done in job design that allow people who want to work longer to be able to work longer.

Organizing the day, the types of tasks that you do. Also, making sure that you don't have jobs that are too physically demanding. Also jobs where you're not, exposed to too many sort of pollutants or, chemicals in the air. So some interesting, research from a French study a couple of years ago that showed workers that had been in these jobs where there was lots of environmental exposure, so lots of noise, chemicals, and I think pollutants in the air also had lower cognitive function in later life.

So these sorts of things get under the skin and, can really affect your kind of health and wellbeing. So that's one thing. And then I think outside of work. The main thing to do really, or outside of that design of work, is to really challenge negative ideas around older adults. So I think that seems to be one of the main things that prevents people from working.

So either ageist stereotypes on behalf of employers, Or most likely people who recruit people to work and they say oh that person can't do the job because they're too old and they make assumptions about people's abilities particularly around tech at the moment that seems to be a particular area where older adults are disadvantaged because of the assumption that they don't know how to do tech forgetting the fact that the people who are older today were the people that developed the tech to start with and they made all the mobile phones and they were the first people to work on the big supercomputers when they were the size of a house.

There's this sort of ageist assumption that older workers can't do tech. Or, almost equally pernicious, is what Becca Levy calls internalized ageism. So you you believe the hype really, you believe the lies, so you start to doubt yourself and you start thinking I can't do that, so I'm not going to apply for that job.

Or, yeah, I should probably make way for younger workers because they need the jobs. So you start to take on those negative ideas around aging and you exclude yourself from opportunities. So I think challenging ageism, and there's a new great, I think it's UN campaign to combat global ageism.

aNd they're doing wonderful stuff. There's an organization in the UK called the Center for Aging Better. They've been doing really interesting stuff, some high level policy stuff, but even basic stuff like, making more normal or everyday pictures of older adults available. If you're doing any marketing, You know, 10 years ago, if you went on one of these, stock photo databases and types in older adults, you get wrinkly hands, walking sticks.

There's one that I saw when I was trying to design a presentation for retirement. So I typed in, I want some images for retirement, part of all boxing gloves hung up. So hang up your gloves, retired and you're out. So there was a lot of negative imagery around aging. So just not even like overly positive, because that can also be a form of ageism.

Oh, if you don't have a yacht in your seventies, you've failed. But just everyday people. And I think that, that's done a lot, I think, to challenge some of the assumptions around aging. So I think, better work design and challenging ageism, and I think better kind of work policies to allow for flexibility would do a lot to allow or improve, job opportunities for people as they age.

Nigel Rawlins: That's amazing. Now that's a really good outline of what's going on. One of the big issues that I think came through a few years ago was the 100 Year Life Books by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. Did that add to this discussion about aging and working?

Yeah, so I think Lynda and Andrew's book has been really huge. I think it's translated into something like 23 or 30 odd languages. It's gone global, which again I think indicates the global nature of population aging and the challenges that lots of countries are facing, even though they're in different cultural, institutional, political contexts.

What I really liked about their book in terms of work was this notion of the sort of the segmented career or the segmented life course. So in work research for quite some time, people have been talking about portfolio careers. So the idea of the sort of leave school at 16, work until you're 65 in the same job and kind of just go up the ladder, that's gone.

I think, in most industries, I would say that's a rarity. Even in an industry as, as what you might call as traditional, as academia, where we have those kind of points, I think even that's become, becoming less and less obvious, or there are more and more ways to go, have an academic career.

Some out of choice, some not. necessarily because of the constraints on the job opportunities. But some people have those kinds of portfolio careers in and out of academia, a bit of stuff is government, bit of stuff in business, come back to academia. I think what Andrew and Linda showed in The Hundred Year Life was if we are to take seriously, extending working life to higher and higher chronological ages as life expectancy is increasing, we can't simply expand that.

1950s model of working one big block of life. Have a little block of life at the start of that's growing, which we call education. It's massive block of life in the middle, which is going to grow, which we call work, and then there's a little bit at the end, which we're going to keep relatively the same, which we call retirement or leisure, but we need to start integrating all those three elements across the life course.

So if we are expected to work until our mid seventies, so I think, Norway has increased its pension age from retirement age to 75. In the UK, it's thinking of going up to 68 by the end of this decade. And then, if I'm not mistaken, will be tied to life expectancy. So if life expectancy rises, pension age will rise, there was, an organization for economic cooperation development, OECD report that came out a couple of years ago, which shows something like 50 percent of OECD countries are planning to increase their pension or retirement age.

This is going on around around the world. I have to have a new model of work and education. We can't expect people to stay in the same jobs from 20 to 50 and then from 50 to 75. We need to train them and give them new ideas because the world around us is changing. So education has to be woven into the life course. And I think we see some of that with lifelong learning.

Although I would argue that we aren't seeing anywhere near enough, and actually I think there have been some developments that have detracted from that. So I wrote a report with a colleague at Manchester, I was at Manchester, Professor Chris Philipson for the UK Government looking at what training and education older workers will need by 2040.

And what we showed was that actually older adults were less likely to participate in work based education, but also less likely to be offered it as well, and less likely to ask for it. So that goes back to that internalized aging. Oh, can't teach an old dog new tricks. I'm not gonna put myself forward, or, I'm okay, I don't really need to learn anything new. But also there's been a decline or there have been a decline. I don't know if that's changed post covid and maybe with the internet and people becoming more okay with online learning. But certainly in the second half of the two thousands, up to the middle of the 2010s, there'd been a change in policy around adult learning, that they got rid of lots of what were called informal learning courses. So people could go up, so my dad was a French teacher, and he used to teach night school, and most of the people that went to night school didn't want a qualification. They wanted to come, eat some French cheese, chat French because they went to France on their holiday.

So they were learning French, but they didn't want a qualification. And those courses got shut down as a kind of a drive to quantify education, which I understand in terms of, employment stuff but, it didn't need to come at the expense of people who were casual or informal learners and I think a lot of learning got lost then and I think they tended to be the older adults who were doing those things out of pleasure because they had a bit of leisure time.

Early retirement was still a thing back then. So I think it tended to have adverse effect on older adults who I think then maybe saw their learning as less valued than younger and working age adults as part of those policies. So we have this idea that Education should be woven through the working life, so the two can go hand to hand.

But that leaves the third strand out. There's this idea that leisure still sits at the end. And I think what Andrew and Lynda did, which was really interesting, and there was also an economist who's unfortunately died recently, Vopel, who also argued about what he called time redistribution. So I remember going to see him and he was an interesting claim.

He said we've dealt with income redistribution. And I think a few people in the audience, probably not quite as much as you'd like. So he said, the next challenge is time redistribution. So how do people have access to good time across the life course and between groups? I thought it was quite an interesting argument.

And he was basically saying that. We need to have breaks, we shouldn't wait until we're older to have this time off. We need these times during the life course to recharge, to rethink. And there's been a little bit of evidence of that from the US and from New Zealand about people taking what they call mini retirements, as an opportunity to step back a little bit, take a bit of a break.

So maybe sometimes around another major life transition and then just You know, be able to go back in, recharge and not think, oh, I've got to, drag it out for another 20 years. But again, for that to work, it needs employers and government to put things in place that people who take these mini retirements or have these career breaks aren't penalized and come back in at the bottom of the pile.

Because, that way won't work. So there has to be, so like a virtuous circle, or what the Danes call a golden triangle between labour market policies, employment, and, people's responsibility for, learning and training as well. I think.. I think that'll be the ideal. I think the problem is certainly for national government policy makers, and this is partly why we're in the situation we're in at the moment, anything to do with population aging has such a long timeline, and politics has such a short timeline, five years in most countries, that every government thinks the next government will pick it up.

No government wants to deal with it because it could be seen as a vote loser, or it's just not on their time horizon. So we've had successive governments that have ignored it, swept it under the carpet, not dealt with it, and then all of a sudden they're like, oh my god, there's this crisis of aging.

It's it's not really, it's become a crisis of ageing because it wasn't dealt with. And I think, again, we're at that point now, particularly post Covid, where I think there was an opportunity to rethink work. That we could go in a different direction and start to develop work that is much more suited to the 21st century than the 20th century. That said, the evidence I've seen is pretty mixed.

Yeah, I have to agree with you. I'm not seeing any real government policy that's going to help people. For example in your 50s you could be unemployed, but you're still too young to get the pension. There's an onus, especially if they've let their health go, and, men and women you're unemployed you're isolated.

And you've got maybe 10 or more years before you can get the pension where you don't have to keep applying for jobs. So that is really, must be a very difficult time for people. One of the things there that we're talking about is in terms of relearning new skills keeping yourself up to date, means you have to take some sort of responsibility for yourself because the government's not doing that.

I think with The 100 Year Life, they were talking about, that maybe you do take some time off, but you'd have to have the money to do that.

Martin Hyde: Yeah, the money and the social support as well. So I think that's another thing to... to say that we often think about older adults in isolation, of you're an older worker we said before, older workers are connected by virtue of living longer to more and more people. So you've got loads of responsibilities.

So yeah, the financial, opportunity to look after yourself. Is clearly important, but you also might have dependents again, both up and down the life course that you're responsible for, particularly in countries where they have, poorer welfare systems and, you are the main earner, in, in that sort of familial network.

So again, it takes governments to be a bit clever and a bit brave. But I think there's precedent for that. So if you look at some of the Scandinavian countries and they're changing policies around paternity leave, for example, where they've clearly seen this is a challenge in terms of gender equality, but also in terms of demography as well, because a number of those countries are starting to see declines in replacement rates.

So they were, seeing, potential population shrinkage. And they said actually we need to make, childbirth and child rearing more equitable, fairer, and supported by all social partners. And the evidence isn't, it's not been amazing. There's still some inequalities in there as well, but from my understanding of the research on the whole, it's been quite welcomed and it's been quite positive. Whereas you see other countries dealing with the same issue and they either take a punitive approach, so if you don't have kids you don't get access to certain benefits or a kind of a bribery approach or if you have children will give you loads of money and they don't seem to have worked because actually it's more about that feeling of, support by all sectors.

And often the money, the finance incentive isn't enough to compensate for that. And again, it tends to rely on gender inequality. So the, women will still have to stay at home and do the child rearing, which again, isn't going to be viable if we want to keep people of all ages working and keep people engaged across the, across the the life course.

I think in the aging sphere, in the policy aging sphere we could and should be looking at those innovations to see what we can learn and whether we can translate that into supporting, people to be able to take these career breaks in order to get the recharge, in order to get the learning and come back.

I think one of the challenges, and it reminds me of a really heartbreaking experience I had on a chat I had with an older guy in North Wales when I first moved to Swansea. is that in very few governments, and certainly not in the UK, is there a department that is solely responsible for older, for aging older adults.

So older adults and aging fall between many stools. So they fall between the health care, the Department of Health, the Department of Work and Pensions Department of Social Care and the Department of Social Services. Or if it's health and social care. So there's not an overarching life course approach to, to deal with these issues.

So if you're 50, you fall somewhere in the benefits, you're out of work, you don't really hit in health and social care, Department of Work is not working, you're not in pension. So there's no one that's looking after your situation holistically. So when I first moved to Wales, so before I was in Wales, I was in Manchester.

So for listeners that don't know because not everyone does, so the United Kingdom is made up of four countries England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland and Wales in particular have, semi independent or devolved governments. So the governments have some a bit different abilities to do different or ability to do different things than the UK and different, you can spend your money slightly differently.

So one of the things that I was keen to do when I moved here was to understand that better and understand the landscape of aging in Wales. Me and a colleague from. the Older Persons Commission. So I should also say that Wales was the first country in the world to have a statutory body that looked after the interests of older adults.

So the Older People's Commissioner, there's now one in Northern Ireland and I think they have one in Scotland as well and they're pressing for one in England. And that's been a really great initiative in terms of giving older adults a voice at that kind of statutory level. So me and a colleague from from there, did a little tour of Wales.

I remember talking to a guy in North Wales and he'd been a computer engineer. And his wife had got ill, so he had reduced his hours. And then his wife had got really ill, so he'd left work to look after her. Fortunately she died shortly thereafter and he was in his early 60s. He'd always loved work. He was one of the, again, talking about that generation being the first generation, the pioneers of IT.

He started work on when, IT really kicked in. But because IT changes so quickly, his skills from that kind of five years from caring for his wife had changed so that the systems he used were no longer in use and there was no one to train him on the new stuff. So when he went to the job center to find work, they gave him training on things like how to write an email, how to use word, because that was the IT training.

So he paid hundreds or probably thousands of pounds to get this training himself. And he was a very smart guy. The guy that I was traveling with had been an IT specialist. So he knew this guy would do his stuff. And it was just tragic that, those skills, that human capital went to waste just because there's not that kind of understanding of the diversity of skills amongst older adults.

They just think you're just IT illiterate rather than thinking, oh, this guy knows his stuff let's, find him a course that kind of teaches him, I don't know, Python or Squirrel or whatever C suite, it just that, that will stay with me for a very long time. The system has just failed him and, he was really depressed because of that, because, work had been such a big part of who he was, clearly, valued his skills and then to basically be thrown on the scrap heap, was a real challenge and it wouldn't have taken much to get him back in, and get him back working and doing something really productive. And he'd have probably stayed working then until his mid seventies, if not longer, because that's what he wanted to do, particularly his wife's passed that, he wanted to get back into work and be active.

And I feel that's the thing when people go, Oh, aging is really horrible because look, there's a sad old guy sat on the bench in North Wales. And he's yeah, but that's because a lack of support put in there because if he'd been kept in work, he'd been physically and cognitively active, he'd been socially engaged.

Because he hasn't, he's got lonely and depressed.

Nigel Rawlins: So really, there we're talking about talent, aren't we? The people have got talent, but they may need a little bit of a boost to keep employed. One of the big things I'm seeing, and I think it's because of COVID and because of globalization and the internet and all that, if you've got some talent, you can get onto these online platforms and start getting freelance work.

Just before I spoke to you, I hired somebody in Pakistan, to do some work on my podcast, and, I have people working in the Philippines for me doing certain jobs.

I've hired people in Spain. Now they're all ages, but if you've got a talent, and the employers can't find somebody, then that's changing the nature of work as well. Are you seeing anything in that regard?

Martin Hyde: So, you it's one of the oft quoted statistics that the self employed, so the over 50s are the fastest growing group of self employed certainly in this country, I think through most of Europe, at least. And also older entrepreneurs have higher success rates than entrepreneurs of other ages.

So there's something about that learning and that understanding of your market, of your abilities, of building those skills and the networks that you have, but also knowing, how to make good choices. That said, there's still, high rates of failure because entrepreneurship is risky.

So again, there's stuff that can be done there, I think, to better support people. I think, from the evidence and the anecdotal and statistical evidence that I've seen, a lot of people feel that there isn't enough support and information out there. And where it is, it does tend to be geared towards younger adults, and people don't often think about the sorts of resources, materials, learning, and support that older entrepreneurs might need, and that it might be different. So there's a conditional success story there. That said, I've not really seen lots of evidence around that sort of online freelancing.

Unfortunately, I think that the way in which the gig economy is presented in this country, both in popular and political discourse, is the sort of delivery, jobs get on your bike. So I don't know if you saw relatively recently, one of our esteemed ministers told the over fifties that they should get on their bike and start doing delivery jobs for, minimum wage, which, is just super condescending, to be honest. And there are people that want to do that. We used to have a guy that did our Amazon deliveries for us. He was in his late fifties. I think he'd been made redundant and he loved his job and he loved his job, cause he's, as he said to me, you got to speak to different people every day.

Maybe it's because you live in a small village in South Wales still, and people are friendly. I imagine there are other parts of the country where that's not such a desirable job. But he absolutely loved it, so for him that wasn't a, that wasn't a thing. But to assume those are the only type of gig jobs that older adults can get is again a massive disservice to the range of skills and talents that people have in it. I think again it just comes down to that just equipping people with those small skills that they need that could radically transform their labour market and employment opportunity. So again, another example from my tour of Wales, we visited one of the more deprived areas of Wales in the Valleys.

And we were there. And this is a big coal mining area, the coal mines shut, they then brought in these kind of big distribution warehouses and then they closed. So it, it was a pretty deprived, economically deprived area, but people loved it. It's really, natural scenery, really lovely, and they still like that real sense of community there. And two women had started an upcycling hobby. And they started to go and teach kids in schools, like traditional make and repair, skills of sewing, knitting, darning, stuff like that, because that's what they'd done when they were kids. And they were so good at it, people started to bring their stuff to them, to upcycle, like old stools and at some point someone said to them, you could turn this into a business. And they said that's great. But we don't know how to make a website. They were I think in their late 60s, early 70s. And I'm not really interested in doing that. And I think that's the other thing we can say, right? Okay, you're not interested in doing that. And so I think they talked to somebody and it was like, we need a website and then you need an accountant because you're gonna have to do all your books.

And all these things got put in place that were just obstacles to them. So they just didn't do it. And what they were saying, again, was, it's a relatively small thing that we would do. We can't afford a full time accountant, but maybe there's some people in the next village that are doing something similar, like bike repair, or they're selling candles that they make. Could be pooling accountant, like just a different economic model where you could have some kind of sharing. So you could all get that kind of accountancy firm to look after those small businesses. And I just feel like there's so much innovation . And it just seems like they come up against a lot of obstacles that to me, and I'm not, an expert in finance, but to me don't seem insurmountable.

So I think there's an issue of will here again, and it goes back, I think, a little bit to ageism, unfortunately, and where they're just not prepared to take a bet on those kinds of, small businesses because they're run by older workers, which, is a great shame. When I was in New Zealand just down the road from you in June.

And I gave a talk there, so they've had a long running longitudinal study of aging called the Health Work and Retirement Study. And I gave a talk at their 20th anniversary event, which was awesome. And as part of that they've been engaging with older workers. Around the country. And there were a couple of older women from South Island, so I think down in Dunedin, who'd worked in the, the canteen at the university.

And it was one of the workers that got together with, I think it was a lecturer in bio something, and they'd started a new gin company using the crusts of old bread. And again, for me, I look at a crust of old bread and I think, oh, the birds will love that. That's great. In no universe would I look at that and go, I make gin out of that. And now it's a kind of a global, bespoke gin. That's the kind of innovation kind of skills that we have in the older workforce. But And if we don't harness that and we don't support it, then, we'll, we're all going to lose out. Not that I particularly like gin, those innovations even if it weren't the case that we're having smaller and smaller numbers of younger adults coming through because of demography, even if that were not the case, what sensible society or organization would cut off the talent of half of its population just based on an arbitrary number.

Oh, you've been on, you've been on the planet this number of years. You had an accident of birth. You had, you'd been born there, right? You'd done, if you say it out loud, it's absolutely absurd. And yet, there are positive steps, but it's still, I think far too slow in order to really address this challenge that we have.

Nigel Rawlins: I totally agree there. Alright thinking about you're a chap in your 40s, and for example, we'll be probably waiting a long time for governments to actually do anything that will come through and as if they do take an initiative, it could take 20 years to really charge.

So you're in your 40s, from what you know, how would you plan your next 40 years? Because there's a good chance you'll be able to work to your 80. What sort of planning would you do for yourself? Obviously you're a man, so the planning for a woman would be probably quite different. What would you suggest that somebody in their 40s would look to the future to do?

Martin Hyde: Genuinely, I think the thing to do is start to really think about what you want from work. And start to think about what those key things are. Some of it will be finance, but I think there's a point at which you have to ask how much money do I need? Is that, or is that the sole thing?

If that's the sole thing, that's fine. But are there other things that you might need from work? And certainly evidence suggests that people that have high levels of job satisfaction, a sense of purpose at work, are the people who stay healthier at work and work for longer. So I think that's the first. What do you want from a job? Are you getting it from your current job? And if not can you start to think about other jobs that you might want to do? So in the UK over the past, I think, five, 10 years, they've started to introduce this thing called a midlife MOT where people really just do this sort of life check, right?

What do I really want? What are my priorities? What are my values and what do they align with? And some of that could be in paid employment. It doesn't all have to be in paid employment. So if I, do I get, what do I get out of paid work? And can I supplement that with activities elsewhere? I think the other thing I'd say, and I'm absolutely the worst example of this, is also when you hit 50, get a hobby because you're going to need that.

Otherwise you'll go spare. So that's the thing I'm trying to think about what to do. Because I just work. So you need to start to think about stuff outside of work as well, because even if we're working for longer, there will be a point where we either work less or we stop working, and you need to have something to take the place of all that thing that you've done, for that long of your life and for that many days of the week and that many hours of the day. I think the other thing to do as well is to really ask about, are there things at work that can be changed to improve your longevity at work? And if so, ask for them. I think again, we're too scared to ask have a look at what's available to you at work, but also nationally. So again, in the UK, we've changed our policy around flexible work.

It used to be that only certain groups... Really young women could ask for flexible work. Now, everyone has the right to ask, you don't have the right to get it, but you have the right to ask. And we're seeing some very forward thinking companies introduce things like grandparental leave as well. So if you have to care for grandchildren and also for parental care leave as well.

So there are some really forward thinking companies. So again, do you want to go and work for them? Or can start to lobby your company to implement the same sort of policies? Are there things that you can do to improve your immediate working station? I know, often we fall into bad habits.

We sit down too long. We don't do all the ergonomic stuff, but it does work, right? And if you do want to stay working for longer, as you age, there is a chance that you will pick up small little wiggles and aches and pains and all the rest. And because the pressure is on us to work for longer, and we don't often work in healthy ways, they can be exacerbated.

So think about small things you can do to improve your physical health as well. I think is, a major determinant. So the two main reasons people leave work through, what we call disability or sickness pensions or through poor health, musculoskeletal problems. So not getting up and moving around enough or lifting heavy things and psychological or psychiatric sort of mental health problems.

The other thing then is to find something you love. If you don't love your work and you can't leave it for whatever reason, find stuff outside of work that you love to give you that. But try and find stuff that keeps you cognitively engaged. So if you're, if the work itself maybe isn't as cognitively engaging as you like.

Try and take a course, try and look at what's freely available. I think, in the days of the internet now, there's so much stuff that's out there often free or very affordable that people can get on podcasts. There's a lot of stuff there that you can do to keep engaged.

And then I think, I would say that more general advice around staying fit and active, because that will allow you to remain in work and remain positive. And then I suppose the other thing as well is challenge any ageist assumptions that you have.

Or that you hear raised. Be a bit of a warrior for that as well. I think, we wouldn't tolerate people saying sexist and racist things at work. I think ageism should have the same level of stigma as well. I think, we need more people to stand up and call that out as well.

I think the other thing to say is that's from my side. The caveat to that is there were two other big parts of that, which is the organizations and the governments also have to step in and do stuff to support those kind of things. Things are improving, but it's very variable. You can look at good practice in, in certain areas. And again, maybe, taking that into your discussions in your work group, company, union, wherever the vehicle for raising those issues are, more evidence and more, knowledges about what works, I think is really useful.

Nigel Rawlins: That's brilliant. Thank you very much for that. We're coming towards the end, so is there something else you'd like to mention? I know you're incredibly busy. I look at all your advisory roles, your professional involvement, the publications and editorial roles, your research studies. You're a busy person.

Martin Hyde: Like I said, I don't have a hobby, so that's the thing that I need to get up. The thing that I've, it's been at the back of my mind to mention, which I think is really one of the most exciting things I've been involved in at the moment is precisely some of this. sort of translational stuff. So I'm working with, two amazing people.

So a woman called Lucy Standing, who runs an organization called Brave Starts, who does a lot of stuff exactly for this to support people, to find careers and job opportunities for midlife onwards. And Maggie Evans, who's a psychologist and consultant who consults on issues, particularly around kind of recruitment agencies for how to improve recruitment practices.

And then, me as the academics, it's a wonderful collaboration at the moment. And we're on the verge of writing a book that sort of brings all this together precisely around this sort of manifesto about how do you do it? Challenging some of the myths around, oh, it's easy, just, find your purpose or whatever it is, manifest your destiny.

There is some hard graft to be done, if you want to kind of change careers, I think that's the other point to make is don't be afraid of doing the work. Don't be afraid of failing as well, I think is the other thing. If it doesn't work, you do have the skills and ability to do other stuff.

But within that. Try and reduce the opportunities for failure. So talk to people who do that. if you think I really hate my job, I'm done with that. I've done it for 30 years. I want something else rather than just jumping into the dream job, a talk to people that do that again, platforms like LinkedIn or opportunities to connect with other occupational groups or kind of entrepreneurs that work in that space.

Get frank information on what was the trouble, what worked, any advice. If you're thinking about going into a type of organization and see if they offer shadowing opportunities, can I hang out and see how it works? Can I come along? I suppose don't wait for opportunities, make opportunities a little bit for yourself as well.

And, be a bit confident to do that. I know it can be quite hard, particularly you've had a job that hasn't really valued you and you feel less valued because of your age. I think part of it is believing and seeing that age is an asset. We acquire all these skills and, all this kind of ability.

We make all these networks and we should be a bit more confident and powerful about that as we start to look for jobs. And then there's the other piece of the work as well, which is, we need to bring these voices together. So podcasts like yours are brilliant, giving voice to this stuff and, really trying to form that kind of, coalition of the good or whatever, where we share information, we share best practice, we challenge or we call out, stuff that doesn't work well or where we see obstacles unnecessarily placed in the way. I would say over the last 20 years I've seen improvements, when I've been looking at what's going on, but it's the start, not the end.

And I think the more that we can raise these issues, but also provide solutions, I think is the other thing. I think it's not enough just to criticize and say, oh, government's a rubbish. And then expect governments to do stuff because governments are rubbish. I think we say governments are rubbish, so do this instead. And then at least, we're contributing positively to the debate.

Nigel Rawlins: This has been brilliant. And yeah, I'd look forward to reading that book. If somebody would like to get in contact

Martin Hyde: Oh, please do. Yeah, absolutely. I'm always happy to chat. I'm on. Twitter, or X or whatever they're calling it now. LinkedIn somewhere. I don't do it as much as I should. I know you've seen my email at the University of Leicester. So whatever works for people, always happy to yeah, to connect with people that are interested in these issues. Thank you for having me.

Nigel Rawlins: That's fabulous.