It’s going to be the new norm. Taking time out in later life will become as commonplace as a gap year is for the 21-year-old graduate. Our research with companies and employees has shown that once you open a few ‘windows’ (they don’t even have to be doors!) onto what later life might look like, then people of a certain generation suddenly see a sunlit pathway of exciting new opportunities and get very excited about it. Take Barbara. She is an anonymised example to protect her privacy, but we recently spoke to her about pre-tirement. She had not contemplated some of the options we talked about before, because they had simply never been options in the ‘normal’ way of working. It wasn’t done to step outside the standard vertical career ladder and launch yourself into something different, especially at her ‘time of life’. But Barbara is 62 and still has a mortgage to pay, and she is the only breadwinner in the household now. We talked to Barbara about the prospect of time out to retrain for a new, project based career - potentially multiple projects with multiple employers so that she could be super flexible, still earn money to top up her pension and fit in her volunteering, and her grand-children all at the same time. This created a spark of new energy that would make a difference to Barbara’s personal wellbeing and to her productivity back in the workplace. A new career at 63, allowing a year off to retrain, then a phased retirement to suit her own needs. This is a model that could work very well for Barbara and for the UK economy. Keeping older workers in work for longer is one of the easier solutions to the labour shortage impact of Brexit. As we foresaw in our original Brexit analysis, there simply won’t be enough younger people to fill the gaps left by retiring workers. In fact, the under-50s will start decreasing dramatically over the next 7 years, and we are already starting to see the effects:

  • There were 82,000 fewer people between the ages of 18 and 24 in employment compared with a year earlier (despite the reduced unemployment rate).
  • There were 200,000 more workers between 50 and 64 compared with a year earlier

So my answer to the question is a resounding yes please. A sabbatical could be really well-used for retraining in new skills that could keep people like Barbara working for as long as she wants and needs to. She will come back with new skills, new confidence and new energy, and thank her employer for it. Of course, there are lots of other good uses for a sabbatical, including just getting used to time undefined by your job. But my focus here is on lifelong learning (a passion of mine - I have just signed up for another study programme to fit in around my day job, my small business side-line and the three grandchildren). I can’t wait for my own later life gap year! I hope it catches on.