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you
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sixty-six years old that was the average
life expectancy of a Swiss man in 1948
when the pension system was introduced
and the retirement age was set at 65 if
we were to apply that logic to today's
reality we should be working to an 81
I'm not suggesting that we work until
were 81 but I do believe that setting
the retirement age for most of us at 60
something is having devastating
consequences on the way we manage our
entire working lives it's time for a
paradigm shift in the way we think about
employability to open up new
possibilities for ourselves before and
after the age of 65 and make the idea of
working for longer actually become
appealing I started thinking about this
a few years ago myself was playing with
my eldest daughter she was 6 at the time
and I asked her what she wants to be
when she grows up and to be honest I
expected her to say something cool like
a ballerina or an astronaut and instead
she said I want to do what you do mom I
was very flattered to start with and
then I realized that she doesn't really
know what I do so I asked her and what
she said was oh you fit in meetings work
on the computer and had a lot of money
so that we can have a nice life it
wasn't at all the role model I wanted to
be for her and looking around me at the
middle-aged colleagues in banking who'd
been sitting in meetings and working on
the computer for decades I realized it
wasn't the right role model for me
either it got me thinking and I decided
to do a Master of Science which led me
to write my thesis on lifelong
employability what do we need to do to
remain employable for longer and why
aren't we doing it and before I talk
about what we can do I'd like to share
three things that are hindering us today
firstly the way we think about
employability our attitudes our behavior
is limited held back by the social norms
we've grown up with we accept for
example that it's perfectly normal to
work like crazy and put other stuff on
our life on hold in order to remain
employable even when those things are
our relationships personal development
and even our health it became clear that
people understand that the social norms
and psychological contracts that govern
how we live today were developed for a
previous era but they're so engrained in
our thinking the most of us simply end
up following them secondly we have a
tendency to use age as a proxy for stage
in many areas of life and when it comes
to work that leads to an expectation
that the older you are the more
experience you should have the more
responsibility you should have the more
status and salary and it's a model that
companies have used for decades to
manage the workforce and make decisions
on things like pay scales promotions
training opportunities many of us strive
to fit our careers to that model or at
least make it look that way in our CVS
maybe smart companies are thinking about
the future of work and what it means for
their employees and they're realizing
it's not about predicting precise skills
and qualifications that we're going to
need but about ensuring sufficient
agility of an organization in order to
thrive often the assumption is made that
older workers are less able to be
flexible and therefore remain employable
than their younger colleagues against a
backdrop of an ageing society that could
spell disaster except and this is
important for us as individuals as well
as for companies it became clear that
the person's ability to remain
employable is not
driven by the chronological age they
from the date of birth but by their
openness to experience openness to
experience is a personality trait and it
refers to our ability to and willingness
to make new experiences and learn from
them if you're someone who is have a
high openness to experience and I
presume all of you people in the
audience today are these people you're
probably already doing lots of things to
remain flexible in your approach to your
working life but and this is the third
Talent
many adults of all ages have unlearned
how to be open to experience and are
thereby unwittingly putting their own
employability at risk and the thing is
none of this have anything to do with
age and everything to do with openness
to experience and that is good news
because unlike our chronological age
openness to experience is something we
can do something about having done this
research has changed the way I think
about employability in fact I no longer
talk about employability as the ability
to find a job on the job market but
rather employ agility the willingness
and ability to flexibly shape our
working lives to adapt to changing
circumstances and thrive in them and
there are five areas that are important
for that because I didn't want my thesis
to stay locked up in a book on the
Springer website I've pulled them
together into a framework the
employability framework an important
part of the framework is an online tool
which enables people to assess their own
employed ility in a structured way it's
available online and it's free and
you're very welcome to try it for
yourself if you do you'll receive a
confidential report with your personal
results and recommendations of things
you can do in these five areas to
improve your
rigidity so what are these areas all
about when it comes to learning we tend
to assume that our ability to learn will
decrease automatically with aid but
research including work done by the
dynamics of healthy aging research group
at the University of Zurich have shown
this is not the case the human mind has
a huge capacity to learn throughout our
entire lifetimes if it's kept in
practice and that's where the problem
lies because as adults we spend a lot of
time in our comfort zone where we know
how things work and we don't need to
learn that much over the time we forget
how to learn and when we are then
confronted with new stuff with change we
doubt our ability to handle it learning
agility is about relearning how to learn
and a determination to use it rather
than lose it networking it's not about
attending lots of wine and cheese events
or about getting as many social media
contacts as we can but most of us tend
to underestimate the value of our
network maybe until we start looking for
a new job if we can reframe how we think
about networking whilst within employed
not only in the company we work in but
also in the industry outside in other
industries online and through our social
network of family and friends we can all
make huge leaps in our employ jealousy
the way we work together and lead and
collaborate is changing as new business
models emerge and Technology infiltrates
our jobs knowledge is no longer power
but the way we share knowledge and
access knowledge is very powerful and
the kids growing up today they know
their stuff intuitively my daughter was
still in kindergarten when she said to
her friend on the bus let's ask my mum
she might not know the arm
but she's got Google in her handbag well
being is an obvious one and there's
plenty of advice out there about what we
should be doing to manage our health
there's no one magic recipe it boils
down to understanding your own health
and what it takes for you to be mentally
and physically resilient most of us do a
pretty good job of keeping our
smartphones nicely charged but when it
comes to doing the same for our own
energy levels it's often a different
story
and finally career development is about
letting go of that linear model and the
outdated norms that hold us back and
decoupling the discussion from age and
finding ways to redefine what success
means at various stages of our lives and
genuinely redistribute work leisure and
education throughout our longer lives
take a moment now to think about these
areas in your lives and as we're
celebrating 10 years of TEDx Zurich
today let's think back 10 years to 2009
how have you developed in these areas
since then what decisions have you made
what advice would you give your younger
self of course the real question is what
can you do now to ensure you have
sufficient agility for the coming
decades so that you can thrive in the
years ahead
it's certainly something that my husband
and I have taken to heart and I'm
pleased to say it's starting to rub off
on how our kids think about work when
somebody recently asked my youngest
daughter what she wants to be when she
grows up she said first I want to save
the environment and then I'll do
something else
I urge you to start driving your own
employer jealousy and help those around
you to do the same join me to spread
this idea and create new norms so that
we can create a world in which we have
time to do things other and just work
like crazy in our thirties and forties
where we're not worried about becoming
irrelevant in the workplace or written
off as old in our fifties and sixties
and where we're working in a way that we
are able and actually want to work well
into our seventies and eighties thank
you
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you
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