Championing the over 50s: one woman’s mission against age bias in the workplace

Paul McArdle | Talent & Recruitment Columnist | The Currency

Lyndsey Simpson is a woman with a mission. She is determined to promote the over 50s as a key part of the workforce, now and in the future.

Her journey started with a phone call from NatWest Bank when she was working in recruitment at The Curve Group. She explains: “NatWest needed to hire bankers from the 1990s for a regulated review. The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) was doing a mis-selling investigation into advice that NatWest had given in the 1990s. They needed bankers who were working in that period to look at the case files and decide whether NatWest had given good or bad advice.

“The FCA also said they wouldn’t allow NatWest to hire back their alumni because they would recognise the names in the case files. I rang a few of my ex-colleagues from the 90s and asked them if they wanted to do this kind of project, and they did. A total of 400 people came on board in just eight weeks”.

Something that surprised Simpson was hearing their stories about how perceptions of retirement were not as they hoped. They described it as a rainbow and rather than being a wonderful never-ending period of life it had a 12 to 18 month lifespan.

“At the end of that lifespan, for pretty much every single person, there was a lack of purpose as a shrinking social group, depression, isolation, invisibility, and a deep desire to re-engage. We’ve added 30 years to life expectancy, and therefore, this is a brand new phase of life that people need to work longer in and redefine on their terms,” she said.

I first encountered Simpson at a Mason Hayes Curran-sponsored event in The Westbury Hotel titled “Reap the Rewards: The Business and Legal Case for Retaining and Recruiting over 50s”. Simpson is the founder and CEO of the 55/Redefined Group and a leading advocate for promoting the benefits to employers of employing people over 50 and encouraging employees over 50 to extend their careers.

The business name 55/Redefined is because 55 is the age that Simpson sees as a pivotal point in many people’s lives. They change jobs, become empty nesters, buy holiday homes, or concentrate on their pension pot.

55/Redefined partners with many blue-chip clients, such as AXA, Diageo, Lidl, and Amazon, on its roster of “Age-Inclusive Employers.” Her website has a jobs board with roles for the over 50s, 200 of which are on the island of Ireland.

Harnessing the power of the over 50s

At the event, Simpson spoke about the need for employers to have an age strategy and educated her audience on the shifting demographics. As a population, more people are getting older. In tandem with this, birth rates are falling alarmingly, and she believes not enough attention is being paid to this. Simpson also spoke about unleashing the power of the over-50 workforce and how employers need to harness and embrace it.

So what inspired her to take on her advocacy of the over-50s further?

“I wasn’t going to give up a business that I’ve been leading for 13 years and sell it at a whim. I commissioned an independent research study that looked at both employers’ attitudes to hiring those in their 50s and equally targeted those over 50s from all walks of life, backgrounds, and geographies.

“I wanted to see whether I had hit on an unusual cohort of people or whether this was a bigger thing, not just about bankers. And it wasn’t about specific geographies. That research cemented the fact that there was a huge disconnect. Over 50 per cent wanted to continue to work beyond the age of 65, and a quarter of them never wanted to retire at all.

“This was a big study, with 4000 people over 50 surveyed. We also found that 89 per cent would take a pay cut to change role or industry and what was sometimes driving a retirement or a desire to leave a profession was boredom.”

Challenging the false stereotype

Simpson’s biggest challenge is changing employers’ perceptions of the over 50s in the workforce. She adds: “There was this massive disconnect where employers had not changed their views in many years. Every one of them had exited every employee by the time they reached age 65.

In that particular study, 37 per cent of employers said that they would be concerned about hiring somebody over the age of 55 because they fear that they would get ill more often. The actual statistic is that an employee over 50 is 200 per cent less likely to take a day off work sick than a colleague under 30.

“If we look at mental health absenteeism in 2024, one in three workers aged 16 to 24 has taken at least one day off for mental health absence. That number is less than one in 10 for over 55s. The stereotypes are false,” she pointed out.

So, Simpson embarked on partnering with companies and educating them on the over-50s workforce and how to embrace them.

She says: “The likes of Barclays and Diageo, Warner Brothers, AXA, big brands in their industries, all came on board pretty much at the same time. What was interesting is that several of them had already been identifying the value of over 50s. We were able to bring a voice to their work and to their data.

“Barclays is a great example. They have already spent the last five years or so creating returnship programmes for people in their 50s. In their customer-facing channels they had better customer outcomes when they used somebody with more life experience to handle complexity.”

Barclays found that, by improving customer service in its call centres,  job attrition went down, employees were happy to have a job, absenteeism also went down, and older employees working shifts showed up for work on time and were enthusiastic.

Experience is the key to AI training

She also pointed to Veolia, the global waste management business. They employ drivers in their 70s and 80s to drive bin lorries. “They couldn’t convince younger people to go and work on the bin routes or do rubbish collection. But older employees found that work very purposeful,” she explained.

Simpson also partners with LinkedIn and has access to reams of data. She has an astute observation on AI adoption and how the over 50s have a competitive advantage.

She says, “Just 18 months ago direction of movement in AI was towards youth. It was finding people that could build AI, build large language models, and machine learning. It was skewed to youth because they were the people who had the benefit of studying at university in their early careers.

“With the likes of ChatGPT and open AI models that you can now buy off the shelf, no one needs to build their own AI anymore. They need to train it. And who do you need to train your AI? The most experienced people in your business.”

How to create a new role

Job candidates in their late fifties or early sixties often feel discriminated against, and some resign themselves to retiring, even when they feel they have so much to give. Simpson wants people with this thought process to change their mindset. What advice would she give somebody who has left a job in the bank after 30 years of service?

She says: “If they want to be an architect, there’s nothing stopping them from going back to college and studying, say, architecture. Become a furniture upholsterer, nothing is stopping them from learning that skill at college.

“They can pivot and become a software engineer. Go back to that feeling that they had when you were 10 years old. Where does passion lie? What do you want to do? All our partner employers open their apprentice programmes to people of any age. The limiting factor is that people think they can’t learn something new, but they absolutely can.”

Simpson is not a fan of legal retirement ages. She has made this clear. A lot of Irish firms still have a legal retirement age in their contracts. “It’s irrational”, she says, “because you can have a super healthy 80-year-old and an unhealthy 40-year-old and vice-versa. Age is not a determination of capability to work“.