With Increased Longevity, Young Adults Should Consider a New Type of Career Path

Many young adults feel like they face an unpleasant choice over the course of their work lives: Try to climb an increasingly shaky career or corporate ladder, or bounce around between different jobs and professions.

I believe there’s a third choice, however, enabled by increased longevity: A “sequential” career, defined by work that fits the different stages of a life that could easily extend until age 100. The sequential career can be a sort of “happy medium” with these distinct advantages:

• It offers the flexibility that many Gen Z and younger Millennial workers say they want in a career.
• It makes saving for retirement easier than a career path that, as Dr. Joe Coughlin wrote recently, is “more akin to riding pogo sticks, with leaps, bounds, and occasional bounces not just between jobs but from profession to profession.”
• It can change as your sense of purpose, your passions or your financial needs evolve over time.

To expound upon that last point, I believe an increasing number of adults will discover that having different careers in different periods of their lives is the best plan. One career may work best for your single years, another for the years where you’re married with children, and another once the kids have gone off to college.

Career breaks for a sabbatical or additional learning may make sense for many, as well.

And some workers, after decades of physically demanding or high stress labor, may want to train for a new mode of work. Their bodies literally cannot absorb the continued physical demands or the mental stress of their current jobs. For instance, I have seen ex-truck drivers transition into jobs in senior living and love it — trading the isolation of long hauls for human interaction where they can literally put a smile on someone’s face every day.

If the traditional career path is a long commitment to a single company or industry, and the “pogo stick” path involves frequent and unpredictable change, the sequential career is a compromise. You don’t feel tethered to a single career, but you’re spending enough time in a few careers to build up the financial equity and professional credibility that’s hard to accumulate if you’re bouncing around.

We know that very few careers will be spent in one company or one industry any more. And many careers will extend into a worker’s 70s and 80s — in some cases out of necessity, and in some cases by choice. So we are no longer talking about a 30- or 40-year work journey. It could be a 60-year work journey. A sequential career path should increase the odds that the journey is both financially and personally rewarding.