‘I did an apprenticeship to learn a new job aged 60 – now I’m earning more’

Jennie Smith had always assumed she would get to choose when she retired.

But when she was made redundant aged 59 after two decades working for a media company, she faced the prospect of a “cliff-edge retirement”: an abrupt, often involuntary, end to working life that affects around a tenth of 55- to 64-year-olds in Britain.

With only a small mortgage and three grown-up children, Smith had little financial incentive to seek new work. And finding another local office-based role matching her experience seemed unlikely.

Determined not to let the shock of redundancy knock her out of the workforce, she instead decided to start retraining to make herself useful in a new profession: decluttering.

“I felt like I still had a lot to offer,” she says. “I didn’t want to sit alone at home all day while my husband worked. But I’d worked in an office my whole life so I was looking for something completely different.

“I’d always enjoyed decluttering and so it made sense when I was made redundant to dive headlong into it as a second career.”

Jennie bought books on how to organise homes, attended workshops and conferences to meet others in the sector, and signed up to a six-week interior design course to add to her expertise.

At first she worked with friends and family to gain experience. But after gaining confidence, she registered her business – Kent and Sussex Decluttering – and began offering her services online. Before long she had started to build up a steady list of clients.

“There is a real need for helping people move house, especially when they downsize,” Smith says. “The demand means I can now work fewer hours and make the same amount, or more, than I would per day in my old job.”

As Britain grapples with its an acute labour shortage, retraining to stave off a cliff-edge retirement has become crucial to the economy.

Last year, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee warned that rising inactivity can pose “serious” economic challenges, including inflationary wage growth, lower productivity and a strain on public finances.

While it found that long-term sickness was the single biggest driver of the 3.5 million over-50s currently defined as “economically inactive”, the skills gap – a mismatch between the skills demanded by the economy and those possessed by workers – has also contributed.

Since the pandemic, a growing number of over-50s have reported feeling that their skills are becoming obsolete, while 22pc believe it is too late for them to learn a new job, a study by Santander UK found.

This sense of inadequacy is often intensified when they experience a “shock” that forces them to leave their workplace, such as redundancy or illness.

An estimated 450,000 of over-50s are at risk of leaving the workforce because they lack “modern skills”, according to apprenticeship firm Multiverse. However, nearly half of those about to retire say they would consider staying in work if they were given more opportunities to learn.

Euan Blair, founder of Multiverse and son of former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, says these figures underscore why retraining over-50s is crucial to ensuring they can “retire when they’re ready”.

“People should be able to work for as long as they want to,” Blair says. “But what we’re finding is that many workers are being pushed into [early retirement], whether through declining health, age discrimination or rapidly changing skills requirements and lack of learning opportunities.”

Blair’s aim is to halt this trend by expanding apprenticeships to the over-50s. One of their most recent success stories is Julian Bond, who retrained as a project manager shortly before his 60th birthday.

‘I was known as The Oldest Apprentice in Town’

The course, equivalent to a first-year university degree, was offered through The Methodist Church in London, where he had worked for a number of years across various roles. Spotting an opportunity to boost his position in the organisation, he enrolled on the programme, which included one-on-one training, group Zoom sessions, practical work and a final exam.

Being one of the most senior people on the course, Bond says he was often jokingly referred to as “the oldest apprentice in town” by some of the younger participants. “It wasn’t easy by any stretch,” he says.

The training has proved invaluable to keeping him in work, allowing him to progress from grants team leader to project funding officer, and also giving him the confidence to go in new directions. “Unless I was made redundant, I wouldn’t choose to retire any time soon,” Bond says.

Recognising the value of retraining older workers as part of solving Britain’s labour problem, Blair last month scrapped the upper age limit for all his company’s apprenticeship programmes. Now anyone over the age of 50 can learn the same skills as those just starting out in their careers, from data analysis to writing code.

But David Sinclair, of the International Longevity Centre, suggests not everyone needs to become a tech whizz. The impact of working on savings – and emotional wellbeing – means that as long as it keeps people in the workforce, retraining of any kind is worthwhile. This is particularly true if it opens the door to a more satisfying job, he says.

“During Covid, a number of over-50s decided the jobs they had weren’t meaningful enough for them anymore. As you get older, financial reward, while important, is a lot less important than having a good-quality job,” says Sinclair.

“But at the same time, working a few years longer can have a very significant multiplier effect on your long-term retirement income. So it would make much more sense if we had people going into less intense work, but carried on working for longer.”

‘I didn’t want to be doing the same thing later in life’

This was the thinking of Rod Lambert from Kent, after he faced a cliff-edge retirement aged just 50.

Having worked as a sales director for more than 25 years, he picked up an injury that meant he could no longer cover the long distances the job demanded. Lambert opted for an early retirement but shortly after turning 60, it became clear his savings wouldn’t stretch to sustain his lifestyle – and that he would need to go back to work.

Like Smith, the idea of going back to his old profession didn’t appeal. “In later life you might as well do something you enjoy rather than trying to hammer out a living doing the same thing you did before,” he says.

So instead, he began supplying equipment for pickleball – an increasingly popular racket sport that he had picked up some years before as a hobby.

When his local tennis club in Tunbridge Wells became interested in offering pickleball classes to members, he decided to retrain as an instructor.

“Pickleball has exploded around the world in the past 10 years and I was an early adopter,” he says. “I’m taking my Level One instructing course in March and will begin teaching club members, from teens to adults.

“My experience is in sales, I did that for nearly 25 years, but this is something I’m really enthusiastic about.”

Despite all the benefits of retraining for both workers and the economy, government backing for initiatives has been thin on the ground.

A package of support announced in the Autumn Statement focused overwhelmingly on solving long-term sickness and getting back to work.

Meanwhile, a flagship apprenticeship programme for over-50s – known as “returnerships” – was quietly scrapped after being announced in March 2023. Rather than offering company funding for training and development, it was watered down to signpost older workers to existing schemes only.

In the absence of formal government initiatives, Smith believes apprenticeships and the sort of training she did will play an increasingly important role for over-50s looking to extend their working lives.

“My generation has a lot of lived experience and an understanding of people that can only be gained with maturity. To lose all of that would be a real shame.

“I don’t think we should be on the scrapheap. We do have a lot to offer. A different skill set from a younger person, perhaps, but certainly a much needed one.”