Future is arrived: the end of the 3 Stage Life and the beginning of the Multi Stage Life

Futuristic insights into the Age of longevity paradoxes and life-styles associated with it. Based on research and “The 100-Year Life” book by Linda Gratton & Andew Scott

Living and working in the Age of Longevity

Many of us have been raised on the traditional notion of a three-stage approach to our working lives: education, followed by work and then retirement. But this well-established pathway is already beginning to collapse. Life expectancy is rising, final-salary pensions are vanishing and increasing numbers of people are juggling multiple careers.

Whether you are 18, 45 or 60, you will need to do things very differently from previous generations and learn to structure your life in completely new ways.

The book, blending psychology and economics, offers solutions how to re-think your education and your career in the new era.

Here are some key insights:

• Setting time aside to make fundamental investments in re-learning and re-skilling.
• Life will become multi-staged. Two, three or more different careers will be the norm: one perhaps when you maximize your finances and work long hours and long weeks, at another stage you balance work with the family, or want to position your life around strong social impact. This is only one approach to multiple careers, re-locations to different countries, curiosity, new partnerships, all of this will become an inspiration to changing your professional route.
• Transitions will become the norm. With 3-stage life we knew 2 maim transitions: from education to employment ad from employment to retirement. With more stages, there will be more transitions. Being flexible, acquiring new knowledge, exploring new ways of thinking, seeing the world from different perspectives, coming to terms with change in power, letting go of old associates and building new networks — these soft skills which will be required soon and will be more important than hard skills. Social Emotional Learning or shortly SEL becomes a crucial part of the new society.
• Creating different lifestyles. Like using leisure time to invest in skills, health and relationships. Typically leisure is associated with doing nothing. Now and later it will be time to re-think, re-create and invest in the future. Travelling =learning.
• The predictability of age based on the stage of life will disappear. When somebody tells you now that he is in school, you kind of know his age. This will be gone in the future, people will be coming back to schools few times in life.
• Who am I (loss of identity, re-design of identity) — you will need to think about your identity in a different way from those who came before. + less influence of where you started. The past is not predictor of the future anymore.

Picture for a moment a 10-year-old child that you know. You can see how his childhood differ from your own as he takes for granted and intuitively accepts many of the technological innovations that astound you. But it’s not only their childhood that will differ from your own — it’s also their adulthood. Estimates for those who are 8–10 years old now in the US — 104 years of life on average: 3 revolutions in medicine, nanotechnology, and robototechnics.

Dealing with uncertainties more in the employment landscape

Re-designing trajectories and road maps again and again in the employment landscape.

The appearance of new industries and eco-systems:

1. Sectors will change.

Looking forward, there will be more shifts as the economy responds to the rise of information technology, rapid development in robotics and Artificial intelligence, growing environmental concerns — alternative energy resources and resource conservation, water efficiency, recycling and carbon substitution, and the impact of an aging population — healthcare and service provision, food supply will change being combined with genetic engineering these Sectors will become multi-billion industries

2. New ecosystems will emerge.

The above mentioned sectoral change will require people to be flexible in terms of their kills and possible location.

Large firms will be surrounded by an ecosystem of smaller businesses and start-ups. Samsung is doing it already, they built incredibly complex ecosystems of alliances that enable them to partner with hundreds of companies to deliver cutting edge technology and sophisticated services.

3. Sharing Economy.

The technological change reduces information costs and enables buyers and sellers to find each other more easily as well as determine the reliability and quality of each other from independent sources. It is possible right now to sell your skills through platforms like Upwork. Uber and Airbnb. People will stay more in their own houses not in the offices, the barriers between work and leisure become eroded.

4. Flexible smart cities will rise, cluster phenomenon.

San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. Highly skilled people want to be close to like-minded people. Universities in the center of clusters.

New assets and skills

1. Productive assets. Productivity at work, at generating income and career prospects;
2. Vitality assets. Mental and physical health. Friendship, positive family relationships;
3. Transformational assets. Self-knowledge, capacity to capture new information and reach out into diverse networks, openness to new experiences. SEL;