After 30 years as a nurse, Sharon Stone (no, not that one) jumped at the opportunity to take early retirement. “I thought, ‘This’ll be good, going out to lunch with my friends all the time,’” she recalls.

But, a few months on, she was becoming restless. “You start to think, ‘Is this it?’” she says. The turning point came when, in a fit of boredom, she decided to strip the walls of her staircase and launch into some impromptu redecorating: “I went out and bought new wallpaper and paint and all sorts. My husband came home that afternoon and he said, ‘You need to get a job!’”

Stone was surprised to discover that she was in complete agreement. So, at the age of 56, she began looking for a position that would make good use of the range of transferable skills developed throughout her nursing career. A vacancy came up as a funeral arranger with Co-op Funeralcare in Blackburn. Stone got the job and with it came an apprenticeship. When she started in the job, Stone says she felt out of her depth: “When you’ve been nursing for so long, everything that you do, you go onto automatic pilot. Then I came here and it was all new.”

But becoming an apprentice has helped to boost her confidence, and Stone has flourished - so much so that she has become a cheerleader for apprenticeships, passing on advice to her 16-year-old granddaughter, who is preparing to become an apprentice herself once she finishes her GCSEs.

Stone laughs. “She’ll say, ‘Oh Nana, what’s it like? What will I have to do?’ It’s lovely that she’s coming to me and asking me what I’m doing before she’s started.”

All ages welcome

Stone’s granddaughter is a much closer match for what most people think of when they hear the word “apprentice”: a young person starting out in their career, perhaps picking up a trade from a more experienced professional. This is the case in most countries with a comparable apprenticeship system. Indeed, prior to 2007, government-funded apprenticeships were only available to people under the age of 25.

But not any more. Now, apprenticeships are all things to all men (and women). They cover every employment sector imaginable. They can be taken by new recruits or existing employees. They range from level 2 (GCSE equivalent) up to level 7, on a par with a master’s degree. And, crucially, they can be taken by people of any age. The average age of apprentices is going up, in no small part due to the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, which has sharpened employers’ focus on spending their funds on upskilling their existing staff.

In 2009-10, only 18 per cent of apprenticeship starts were by people aged 25 and over. By 2017-8, that proportion had more than doubled to 41 per cent. And each year, more than 3,000 apprenticeships are started by people aged 60 or above.

For many of us, our instinctive response is that the idea of a pensioner apprentice is at best bizarre, at worst downright insulting to someone approaching the end of their working life. It is, perhaps, time for us to change our view.

As the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) put it explicitly in 2017, apprenticeships are an “all-age programme”. There’s nothing legally or ethically wrong with employers putting older people on government-funded training. Why shouldn’t they be entitled to the same opportunities as their younger colleagues? And this shouldn’t just be a gimmick - radical changes to the ways in which we live and work mean that this is becoming a necessity.

Indeed, the big challenge for the UK’s labour force is to keep in step with the changing demographics. The birth rate is falling, immigration is declining and there are a significant number of people aged over 40 who need to work for longer. In 2010, a quarter of the working-age population were aged 50 or over; this is projected to increase to one in three by 2022.

As the DWP’s Fuller Working Lives report put it: “Employers need to embrace the workforce aged 50 years and over.”

Kathleen Elstone is a case in point. She is in the second year of a level 3 childcare apprenticeship. She spends the majority of her time working in a nursery, in addition to one day per week attending functional skills and childcare-theory classes at provider Training Plus Merseyside. Her peers range from 18 to 23 years of age; Elstone is 50. “My son’s 22 so I can kind of relate to the younger generation,” she laughs.

When her son was at secondary school, she began working at a local nursery, having already gained her level 2 qualification. After starting out as a chef’s assistant, she progressed to working in the nursery rooms as lunch cover, and during the after-school club. Now, after moving to a different employer, Elstone has been given the opportunity to do an apprenticeship by her manager, who had progressed through her own career in a similar way.

“At this time in my life, I’m very focused,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of patience, I’m a good listener. I’m nearly at the end of the menopause, and I’ve found that doing the job that I’m doing keeps my brain active.”

After what she describes as an “erratic” education as a child - she moved around the world owing to her father’s military career - Elstone sees her apprenticeship as offering her a second chance.

“Having the opportunity to do this now is something that I’m so happy about,” she says. “I’m making up for those lost years as a teenager. My manager has recently asked if I’m interested in doing my level 4. I thought, ‘Yes! I’ll give it a go’.”

As the state pension age is pushed further and further back - it is currently due to increase to 68 between 2037 and 2039 - many people will give more thought to how they structure their working lives. Those who are currently in their mid-40s may well have to work into their early 70s. That means they’ve got as much of their working life still to come as they have done already. Though apprentices aged over 45 currently make up only 9 per cent of the apprenticeship total, a lifetime of skill acquisition makes them a valued addition to the workforce.

At midlife, a set of circumstances often begin that affect work as well as wider life. Some of those factors are around health and caring, some are linked to finance and some are around the perception of “older” employees in the labour market.

Some people are working longer as a result of previously unplanned, yet exciting opportunities that have come their way. And there are others who have to work longer because they don’t have a pension and can’t afford not to do so. For those people, having to continue working at a point when they thought they would have retired is an almost forced situation.

Whether it’s down to choice or necessity, lifelong learning in the form of an apprenticeship is the way forward for some. But Fiona Aldridge, director of policy and research at the Learning and Work Institute, is not certain that it is the right pathway for everyone. “I think we have to be really clear, both in policy and in funding, on what an apprenticeship is going to be and how we are going to pay for it,” she says. “An apprenticeship could be the answer for some, but you have to think far more creatively about a wider range of opportunities.

“For many people in that age category, it just won’t be the most appropriate route - but we don’t have many other options at the minute. We need to put those in place rather than thinking, ‘Oh, you should be an apprentice’.”

Aldridge suggests that there could be great value to employers in carefully constructing apprenticeship programmes specifically to make use of the skills amassed by someone of more mature years: “You could think as much about what that apprentice brings with their life and work experience, as much as you think about what they get out of it.”

With no upper age limit to apprenticeships and the plethora of changes to the structure of a 21st-century career, it is perhaps time to rethink the long-held concept of the three-stage life. The theory emerged in the early 20th century, based on a simple structure: education, work, retirement. The traditional version of the work segment was often in the form of a linear career path. You would join an organisation as a junior and, with time and experience, work towards a senior role.

Beyond the three-stage career

There are, of course, numerous caveats. In particular, male middle-class professionals are more likely to have followed a three-stage life than most other groups.

By following the logic of that career timeline, you could tell which stage of life you were in simply by your age. So if you’re 18, you might be a student; if you’re 40, you might be middle or senior management; and if you’re 60, you might be retiring.

Women have generally lived a more multistage life, as caring responsibilities for children and parents have historically been seen as female duties. In years gone by, this balance of responsibility left many women penalised in terms of education and career prospects, and the fight for equality in the workplace (and in many other areas of life) is by no means won. The three-stage model of scaffolding for life and work used to offer a very simple idea about what people’s motivations could or should be at any given age. But times are changing.

In the 1970s, the average life expectancy of women was 75 and, for men, 69. Driven by governmental spending on public healthcare and education, as well as improvements in housing, there has been a steady rise in life expectancy in the years since. The Office for National Statistics predicts that, by 2041, life expectancy will be 83.4 years for men and 86.2 years for women.

A range of stories is buried within those overall figures - the mortality rate from avoidable causes is over three times higher in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the UK compared with the wealthiest. But, overall, the demographics of the population that are projected to rise most quickly are the oldest age groups. It is estimated that the number of people aged 85 or older will double over the next 25 years.

The default retirement age of 65 no longer exists and you can keep working past your state-pension age; this is currently 65 for men and is increasing from 60 to 65 for women, but the exact date that you can claim your state pension depends on when you were born. There will be further age increases for both men and women, to reach 66 by October 2020, and again, from 66 to 67 between 2026 and 2028.

The government’s state-pension age review in 2017 explained that when it was introduced in 1948, a 65-year-old could have expected to spend 13.5 years in receipt of the pension - about 23 per cent of their adult life. As of 2017, a 65-year-old could expect to live for another 22.8 years - or 33.6 per cent of their adult life. Such an extensive change to lifespans necessitates changes to state-pension eligibility age and longer careers, indicating that a fundamental shift in how work will be approached. The model of the three-stage life will no longer be viable.

One of the leading advocates of the multi-stage life concept is Andrew Scott, professor of economics at London Business School and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, The 100-Year Life: living and working in an age of longevity. It proposes that a typical career will undergo a series of reinventions.

“You’re going to have several different stages to your career - one may be about money, one may be about work-life balance, one may be something entrepreneurial, one might be something social,” he explains. “And, of course, if you do have a multi-stage career, then you can sequence it in lots of different ways. You can start to arrange things in a way that you can’t with a three-stage life.”

Many people construct their identity or status in close alignment with their job or employer. However, if you are entering the workplace now, in your twenties, knowing that you may be working through to your seventies, it seems highly unlikely that the job you’re currently doing is going to remain the same for the next 50 years.

A sense of exploration

So, how does one create a work-based sense of self if the focus of career activity is in transitions? One thought is to consider which skills, qualities, beliefs and ambitions are threaded through your career path, which makes that journey specific to you.

Scott explains: “I think this makes the career path more value-led. What are the things you like? What are the things you’re good at? And your identity then becomes not a job, but the common principles and common characteristics that link each stage together, which means a deeper sense of exploration.”

The value-led career path runs parallel to the human skills that are predicted to be in demand alongside the advancement of technology, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics.

“Machines are going to be even better at being machines, so humans are going to have to be better at being humans,” says Scott. “We’re going to have to have an education that’s much more based around bringing out human skills - teamwork, leadership, hypothesis testing, coming up with new ideas, experimenting - but also I think being more self-driven.”

Contrary to the outdated narrative of “slowing down” as you get older, there is little data to suggest that age is negatively connected to productivity in the workplace. However, there are clearly sector-specific exceptions: for example, if a job requires certain physical abilities or has an age limit set by law (eg, the fire service).

In general, education is a much better predictor of performance than age, so it stands to reason that if employers don’t educate older workers, then they will be less productive. This brings about questions regarding longevity of knowledge, and whether people learn differently at different ages and stages of life.

Scott uses fitness as an analogy: “If I said to you, ‘How healthy are you?’ and you said, ‘Well, 20 years ago, I ran a marathon’, you’d say, ‘That’s not the question I asked’. If you asked someone, ‘How educated are you?’ and they said, ‘Well, 20 years ago, I went to university’ … Yet, we somehow think that’s a relevant answer.”

People are ageing better, they’re ageing differently, and older people are more educated than past generations.

Andrew Clowes works for Axia Solutions in Stoke-on-Trent. His job is to deliver apprenticeships, predominantly to mature students in the workplace. He has noticed a change in enthusiasm towards education from older employees. “If I’d walked into a company even 10 years ago and asked the workforce if they wanted to do a qualification, you’d probably have got about 10 per cent uptake,” he says. “If you walk into a company today, you’ll get maybe 80 per cent.”

Changing employee mindset

Clowes believes this shift comes down to the recognition that most pensions will no longer sustain the kind of life that the employee had anticipated, so an earlier retirement is not a practical option. In addition, he suggests that there is general concern that current employment may not necessarily be as secure as it once was, so the value placed on qualifications that are transferable between industries and types of job has increased.

“People’s mindsets have changed towards qualifications, and that mirrors my mindset,” he says. “I am one of those people who will always practise what I preach.”

As well as delivering apprenticeships, Clowes, 56, is also enrolled on one - a level 3 team leader/supervisor standard apprenticeship. While he is happy to discuss his own apprenticeship, he does acknowledge the issue of whether the term is an appropriate descriptor for the career path of a mature learner. He says: “I would never call it an apprenticeship to a 40-year-old guy who’s been doing the job for many a year. I’ll call it a qualification framework. The word ‘apprentice’ … it’s a young person’s thing.”

But whatever title we use, training programmes for older people are here to stay - and are only going to grow in importance.

And while Stone, the nurse-turned-apprentice, fully believed that her working life had come to an end, the opportunities afforded by her apprenticeship have led to a complete change in her outlook. Now, she can’t imagine not coming to work.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m here now until I’m 67’, and I’m quite happy with that,” she says. “It gives me another sense of purpose.”

Sarah Simons works in colleges and adult community education in the East Midlands and is the director of UKFEchat. She tweets @MrsSarahSimons

This article originally appeared in the 14 June 2019 issue under the headline “Pension or apprenticeship?”