The argument for an age-agnostic workplace
We talk constantly about age—in politics, in leadership, in debates about retirement and the future of work. Yet we rarely stop to ask a simple question: What is age, exactly? Most of us rely on a single number, as if people were stamped with a vintage year like bottles of wine. But age is far from a fixed or universal metric. It is multidimensional, deeply unequal, and increasingly misleading when used as a shortcut for ability, potential, or readiness.
As people live longer, change careers more often, and experience work in different conditions, understanding what age actually measures is becoming essential for companies trying to build fairer workplaces and adapt to demographic shifts. The future of work will not be shaped by “older workers” alone. It will be shaped by widening age gaps. And by how organizations respond.
Chronological age: The number of years since birth
This most familiar kind of age governs everything from school entry and voting rights to retirement policies and workplace norms. Yet this way of organizing human life is a relatively recent bureaucratic invention, made possible by modern administrative systems.
Chronological age made sense in standardized industrial societies, where careers were linear, life expectancy was shorter, and work was more uniform. Today, it is a blunt instrument. As a predictor of health, performance, motivation, or longevity, it performs poorly. Two people of the same age can have radically different capacities and trajectories, shaped by education, income, working conditions, stress, and life events.
But organizations still lean heavily on this number to make decisions about hiring, promotion, development, and exit. In a world of increasingly unequal aging, this reliance is becoming not just inaccurate but unfair.
Biological age: The condition of the body and brain
Advances in medicine and epidemiology show that people age at dramatically different speeds. Some 55-year-olds have the physiological profile of someone in their forties. Others show signs typically associated with much later life.
These differences are shaped by socioeconomic conditions, education, exposure to chronic stress, environmental factors, and levels of autonomy at work. Long hours, repetitive strain, shift work, and lack of control take a biological toll over time. That’s why for some workers longer careers are perfectly sustainable while for others, worn down by decades of strain, “working longer” can mean never enjoying a healthy retirement.
Biological age forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Aging is not equal, and work is one of the most powerful drivers of that inequality.
Subjective age: All about self-perception
Most adults report feeling younger than their chronological age, sometimes by a decade or more. And that’s great because feeling younger is often associated with better physical health, cognitive resilience, and emotional well-being.
But the gap matters. Feeling moderately younger can be energizing. Feeling dramatically younger can slip into denial, leading people to ignore health signals or overestimate physical limits. Subjective age shapes confidence, ambition, openness to learning, how people interpret feedback, and how they imagine their future.
Interestingly, as people age their definition of what counts as “old” tends to move upward. It’s a reminder that age is psychological and cultural, constantly renegotiated.
Professional age: The number of years in a company or a craft
How long you have been doing a particular role or craft or been working in an industry matters probably more than the birth date on your ID.
It’s increasingly common to be a beginner at 50, a mid-career experimenter at 60, or a seasoned expert at 30. People retrain, pivot industries, take career breaks, and reinvent themselves in ways that would have been rare a generation ago.
Alas, many organizations still assume that chronological age and expertise rise together, which causes a mismatch between talent practices and reality. Experienced beginners are underestimated. Young experts are questioned.
The gaps between these different ages tend to grow
Gaps grow between chronological and biological age, shaped by inequality and work conditions. Between chronological and subjective age, shaped by health, mindset, and culture. Between chronological and professional age, shaped by career transitions and lifelong learning.
Workplaces built on the assumption that age neatly tracks with ability, experience, or stamina are increasingly out of sync with society. As these gaps widen, age-based policies become less sustainable and more discriminatory. And they waste enormous amounts of human capital.
Make the workplace more age-agnostic
To address these issues, we need to move toward a more age-agnostic approach. For example:
1. Stop using age as a proxy for skill, adaptability, or potential. Move away from coded assumptions about being “too young” or “too old.” Base decisions on actual competencies, learning habits, motivation, and the cognitive and physical requirements of roles. Chronological age predicts little of this.
2. Redesign work for people who age differently. Introduce more flexibility in schedules and locations, invest in ergonomic improvements, rotate tasks to reduce physical strain, increase autonomy, and offer phased retirement or transitions into mentoring and knowledge-transfer roles. The goal is to reduce the biological cost of work.
3. Treat reskilling as a lifelong process. As career transitions become normal, invest in training without age limits. Support adult apprenticeships and coaching for second- and third-career moves. Fifty-year-old juniors may be among the most underutilized talent pools.
4. Actively audit for hidden age bias. Scrutinize recruiting and promotion practices for coded language (“high-energy,” “digital native”) and reluctance to train older employees. Address ageism with explicit guidelines and accountability.
5. Promote intergenerational collaboration. Build mixed-age teams where experience and fresh perspectives reinforce each other through reverse mentoring, cross-generational projects, and shared problem-solving. Age diversity is also cognitive diversity.
Age is not a single measure. It is a constellation of biological, psychological, social, and professional realities that rarely align. The companies that will thrive in an aging, unequal, multistage career world are the ones that understand these gaps, reduce the inequalities behind them, and design systems that support people across long, varied working lives.