The government has announced that a rise in the state retirement age to 68, to be phased in between 2037 and 2038. And that means people are going to have to be more entrepreneurial than ever.
We already knew that the state retirement age is rising to 67 in 2028 – bad news for people born in 1961 and onwards.
Now the government has revealed that the retirement age is rising to 68 between 2037 and 2038.
There has been a storm of protest, but we need to get used to it.
The World Economic Forum recently projected that the retirement age across much of the developed world will be rising to 70 by 2050, and could even rise to 80.
It is odd that the news had been greeted by woe.
The reason why the retirement age is going up is because we are living longer, and more to the point, we are living more healthy lives. Retiring at 70 because we are living longer is surely better than the alternative.
And new technologies such as the gene editing tool CRISPR and linked with that cas9, mean we may soon see our lives extended even further. Even age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s may see the emergence of a treatment in the new few years.
It is odd that we are not celebrating this from the highest peaks.
Maybe, it is not so good news if your job involves working down the pit, but the heavy manual jobs are the kind of roles that robots are going to take on anyway.
But what all this does mean is that, during the course of a working life, the jobs market will change radically, and may even change radically again, and again. This means that people may have two, three or even four careers before they finally retire.
People will have to be more adaptive, more-ready to re-train.
And this calls for a more entrepreneurial approach to work, people will have to learn how to apply a more entrepreneurial way of thinking as the era of ‘a job for life’ or even ‘a career for life’, well and truly comes to an end.
It can start at schools, fostering entrepreneurial thinking.
Maybe, it will also help if we celebrate the achievements of entrepreneurs, to date.
The UK is indeed emerging an entrepreneurial success story – but more needs to be done, and one way to achieve this is to shine the media spotlight on entrepreneurs, their challenges, their failures and of course their successes.
The NatWestGreat British Entrepreneur Awards are currently open for applications, and entrants can apply here.
