The Last Word: A longer life will require more than one version of you, and the judgement to know which of the older ones are worth keeping.
A new white paper from Henley Business School starts with a simple premise: working lives can now easily stretch across six decades. Based on interviews with people aged between 19 and 86, it found something else worth paying attention to. When it came to attitudes towards new technology, professional identity was a stronger predictor than age. In other words, how tightly we hold on to who we think we are may matter as much as how old we are.
We spend plenty of time talking about the skills required to stay relevant for longer: learning, adaptability, digital fluency, judgement, etc. But beneath all of those sits a more personal challenge. A career lasting 50 or 60 years is unlikely to be one long, tidy progression towards a grander job title. It is much more likely to involve several chapters, a few detours and, at times, the uncomfortable realisation that the identity which once suited us perfectly no longer does.
There is a useful idea called ‘life crafting’ that has found its way into Centre College in Kentucky. Its Centre Spark programme asks students to think not only about what they want to do, but who they want to become, combining reflection, experimentation and experience into a broader sense of purpose. I like that idea, although I would add one qualification: there probably isn’t one person we are meant to become. If our lives and careers are getting longer, we may need to become several.
I know this from my own experience. I worked as a journalist for around ten years, on and off, although journalism was never the whole story. I was also an analyst, author, storyteller, marketer and creative director; at the same time I became an entrepreneur, later I became a strategist, and today much of my work centres on reinvention, on relevance and value capture in the post-stability world. None of those changes involved waking up one morning as an entirely different person. They were gradual shifts in what I was interested in, what I could contribute and, eventually, how I described myself.
The outside world does not always move at the same pace. Almost a decade after I stopped working as a journalist, Google’s Knowledge Panel still describes me as one. It is mildly amusing—and perhaps evidence that even Google’s algorithms need some reinvention—but it also illustrates how persistent professional identities can be. Old biographies survive, introductions get recycled and people continue to associate us with work we may have left years ago.
Yet I would not want to remove journalism from my story. Curiosity still shapes how I work, as does the instinct to go beneath the first answer, understand a problem properly and find the story inside something complicated. Those capabilities travelled with me even when the title did not and are now even more useful than ever. Reinvention, at its best, is not an exercise in deleting previous versions of ourselves; it is deciding what deserves to come with us.
This is where professional identity can become both an asset and a trap. We invest years building expertise and credibility, so naturally we become attached to the labels that represent them. The danger comes when preserving the identity matters more than staying relevant. Organisations suffer from the same problem: yesterday’s success becomes today’s self-image, and eventually that self-image starts determining which futures appear possible.
A six-decade career leaves little room for that kind of rigidity. In CFA Institute’s 2026 survey, 72 per cent of graduates already expected to have multiple careers during their lifetime, while LinkedIn estimates that people entering the workforce today are on track to hold twice as many jobs over their careers as those who started 15 years ago.
There is no reliable number for how many careers any of us will have — even statisticians struggle to define where one career ends and another begins — but perhaps that is precisely the point. We will need to become comfortable changing the answer to What do you do? more than once, without assuming that each new answer requires us to discard everything that came before. And the point is to keep becoming more of who you are capable of being, while knowing when an old title has finally done its job.
Photo: Dreamstime.