The Talent Strategy Hiding in Plain Sight

Why experienced colleagues in the later stages of their careers may be the missing piece in your next generation talent plan

Why does it appear so difficult to talk about the later stages of a career?

I don’t mean difficult in a logistical sense. I mean the kind of difficult where a perfectly capable, experienced person sits across from you and can’t quite find the words – not because they don’t know what they want, but because somewhere along the way they absorbed the idea that wanting something different meant wanting less.

I’ve had that conversation more than once – with friends and peers who are sitting with the same uncertainty. And every time, what strikes me isn’t the individual. It’s the absence of any framework around them. No language. No pathway. No signal from their organisation that this is a conversation worth having.

I suspect culture plays its part. It would seem that there is an unspoken assumption in many organisations that ambition means you never signal you are slowing down. That raising the question of a phased transition or a reduced role is somehow an admission of diminishment rather than a mark of self-awareness. People who have spent careers projecting certainty find it difficult to have a conversation that requires vulnerability. And organisations that have never built the framework cannot suddenly expect it to happen naturally.

But maybe it’s also generational. Those of us who grew up in the Generation X and Baby Boomer years were shaped by a particular set of instincts – self-reliance, work as identity, and a resilience that meant you kept going regardless. Whether these are hard truths or modern-day tropes, they may resonate with many who grew up in those eras. They were generations that largely figured things out for themselves, built their sense of worth around work, and prided themselves on never signalling weakness. Admirable instincts in many ways – but ones that make it almost impossible to sit across from someone and say: I’d like things to look different now.

The cultural and generational forces I’ve described are real. And their consequences – the absence of framework, the silence in the room – are more common than we might like to admit. And if leaders can’t have that conversation, nobody below them will feel safe having it either. Yet this group represent one of the most underutilised assets in our collective response to the talent challenges we all face.

The talent challenge facing businesses today is real and well documented. Youth unemployment is rising. The pipeline of new entrants into many sectors is under pressure. Cuts to Level 7 apprenticeship funding risk closing off an important entry route for people in their twenties for roles like Law, that require further qualification. And the so-called lost generation – young people neither in employment, education nor training – represents both a societal problem and a missed opportunity for organisations willing to invest in developing new talent.

We are right to focus on this. The urgency is real.

But in our determination to solve the entry end of the talent pipeline, we have, perhaps, become myopic. Are we are failing to connect both ends of our talent management objectives – and in doing so, undermining the very strategies we are trying to build?

You cannot build a sustainable next generation talent strategy without first asking who is going to develop, coach and mentor that next generation when they arrive.

The answer in most of our businesses, is experienced colleagues in the later stages of their careers. The practitioners, specialists, technologists, operations leaders and the many others whose expertise keeps a modern organisation running – at every level – who carry the institutional knowledge, the technical depth and the professional judgement that takes decades to accumulate.

And yet when did we last approach this end of the talent equation with the same deliberateness we apply to everything else?

We have invested significantly – and rightly – in designing flexible, humane pathways for colleagues returning to work after having children. That progress was hard won and genuinely matters. But have we applied the same creativity or intentionality to the other major career transition that affects our workforce: the move towards the later stages of a career and, in time, whatever comes next for them?

Often the result is that experienced colleagues leave on default terms. Full time until they don’t want to be – and then, too often, gone entirely. Taking their knowledge, their networks and their mentoring capacity with them – often abruptly, without adequate succession planning, and almost always without any deliberate attempt to extend what they can contribute.

But what does it cost us when experienced colleagues leave on those terms?

Done well, a retention and transition strategy for experienced colleagues is not a separate workstream from your next generation talent strategy. It is a direct enabler of it. When experienced colleagues move into deliberately designed roles that shift the balance from doing to developing, three things become possible.

Exit pathways become visible– businesses can see transitions coming and develop into those gaps with intention rather than scrambling to fill them.

Succession planning – becomes real – you cannot build a credible pipeline without knowing when the people at the top of it are moving on.

And organisational memory is protected – the knowledge that leaves with an experienced colleague is not just technical. It is relational, cultural and contextual, and younger colleagues cannot develop without access to it.

None of this requires radical reinvention. It requires the same thing that flexible working for returners required: a willingness to have the conversation, design the options and make it normal. Phased transitions. Job shares. Role redesign. Formal mentoring responsibilities built into later career structures. These are not exotic ideas. But I wonder whether we consistently apply the same thinking in this direction.

The ‘dead man’s shoes’ concern will come up. But the argument here is not about keeping experienced colleagues in place and blocking progression. It is about redesigning roles so that transitions create space, not blockages – and so that knowledge is transferred deliberately rather than lost entirely.

Most organisations are well practised at responding to external pressure. The harder discipline is looking inward – at the assumptions we make about how careers evolve, the conversations we are not having and the talent we may be allowing to drift away without a second thought.

I work in personal injury law – a sector that knows better than most what it means to navigate relentless change. I fear this conversation remains underdeveloped even here. If we are serious about attracting and developing the next generation of talent, we need to be equally serious about the experienced colleagues who will shape, guide and sustain them.

The next generation of professionals will only truly thrive if the people who can develop, coach and guide them are still there when they arrive. Whether we are doing enough to make sure of that is a question worth sitting with.

It’s think its time to look in both directions.