Early career decisions could affect when you retire

Policies to extend working life should not exclusively focus on older people as the decision on when to retire is inàuenced by the course of a person’s career, according to researchers investigating the factors affecting how long people work.

Europe’s population is aging and pension systems are now struggling to pay out. At the same time, people are staying healthier for longer, making them capable of prolonging their working years. In many European countries, therefore, governments are slowly increasing the retirement age, phys.org wrote.

But what inàuences whether someone wants to work for longer?

Professor Kathrin Komp from Finland’s University of Helsinki has spent the last two years investigating what makes someone want to work in old age. She looked for clues by analyzing interviews about people’s entire working lives and conducting a survey in Finland, as part of the Eu-funded Nowork project.

Her most important ¿nding was that the decision to work past retirement age is shaped before old age. A person’s experiences in youth and middle age were partly responsible. People with a higher level of education, for example, usually had jobs with varied tasks that were considered more attractive.

“Consequently, people in these jobs are more interested in working to a later age,” said Komp. Staying healthy also predetermined a longer working life.

She said that policies aiming to extend working life shouldn’t therefore focus on older workers alone.

“People need to be supported during youth and middle age, for example by promoting lifelong learning and by encouraging healthy lifestyles,” she said.

Komp is now following up on the project by developing a forecasting tool to determine whether someone is likely to have a long working life. Initially, she is analyzing people’s career trajectories, looking at, for example, whether they have periods of unemployment or take time off for childcare. Later on, she will see how this correlates with retirement age.

The tool, which will take several years to complete, should be useful for pension insurers and unemployment agencies since it will allow them to ¿nd trends in the general data that impact people’s lives in old age and address those issues early on.

“There would still be time to intervene before problems manifest themselves,” said Komp.