Speak up!
New findings on professional visibility in late career
What does using your “voice” mean in late career? It may be more important than you think.
Recent research from Australia has found that younger colleagues often rely on surface level characteristics, like age, as an “informational cue” and end up estimating lower competence and trustworthiness in older colleagues. These estimates hold unless late career professionals actively communicate their engagement with current challenges, which researchers call using “voice.”
There were two studies in the research, one in Taiwan and the other in Australia, with about 375 participants across the two. Both studies looked at “flat” teams where one colleague was noticeably older than the others. In the Australian study, reduced trust appeared as lower perceived competence, (it didn’t affect likeability) — and using “voice” eliminated that “competence penalty” entirely. The Taiwan study found the same protective pattern: “voice” countered the trust-damage that comes from a big age gap.
This research touches on some big forces currently buffeting the workplace. Fast paced economic, technological and social change mean that while early career professionals are experiencing “the end of predictable progress,” late career professionals are pioneering longer working lives.
In the current late career cohort, people in their 50s and 60s, we are much healthier and more tech fluent than any prior cohort. Our labor and skills are becoming increasingly central to economic productivity, and society is scrambling to prepare for an unprecedented aging workforce that healthy longevity enables. At the same time, age-related bias isn’t changing to keep pace, even though the science doesn’t bear it out.
From the perspective of late career, there are several contributing factors that further support the idea that late career professionals need “voice.”
Workplace evolution
The researchers point out that modern workplaces are increasingly adopting more horizontal, less hierarchical organizational structures. It’s more common to see people with significant age gaps working in the same roles, such as “senior consultant” or “engineer.”
Many of us currently in late career have come up during a period when lifetime employment at one company, and single corporate ladder climbing, became less common. Instead, we’ve had portfolio careers where we may not have built traditional seniority within an organization or role. That could be because we ... had to cope with a big disruptive life event, built a career as a trailing spouse, just wanted variety, or figured out what parts of work we wanted to do.
Lacking this perspective, some younger colleagues may wonder, “why haven’t they advanced to more senior positions?” and assume it’s a sign of decline or inability.
Pandemic effects
The pandemic and remote working also seem to have exacerbated poor communication among older and younger professionals. In 2024, LinkedIn research suggested that 20% of Gen Zers hadn’t had a single conversation with someone over 50 in their workplace in the last year.
Even worse, “Around 40% of those over 55 haven’t spoken to a Gen Z colleague in the past year either…Three-quarters of early career professionals previously told Fortune that they wouldn’t talk to their senior coworkers unless the senior made the first move.” The background level of communication, and therefore information about us, may be poorer than we think.
Rapid technological, social, and economic change
With rapid change all around us, everyone is relatively new to emerging technologies, systems and social arrangements.
Consider payment systems. For more than a hundred years, people used cash or checks to make payments. Even credit cards have been around for about 60 years. But in the last 5 to 10 years, new payment systems like contactless, phone/watch wallets, person to person (Venmo/Zelle), e-wallets like Paypal, and cryptocurrency have all come on the scene.
In previous late career cohorts, it was possible, after 30 years in payment systems (“banking” back then), to know almost everything about paying by check (or even by card) because it was relatively constant. Now, although we may have 30 years of experience in payment systems, we only have 10 or fewer years of experience in one of these new systems, because that’s how old these systems are.
Similar upheavals are taking place in the way we educate ourselves, our family structures, and our news and information environments, to name just a few.
If it’s all new, younger professionals may wonder what good is a long career of experience in earlier technologies or earlier organizations?
What good is experience?
Although technology matters, human factors are important and rising on the agenda. People—human brains and bodies—have not changed as fast as technologically driven change across society. So while late career professionals do keep up with technology, we also typically bring experiences with people and projects:
Judgment and emotional intelligence to help make decisions and apply perspective.
Pattern recognition – a richer library of patterns to match against, having seen more failures, edge cases, turn arounds, and transitions play out.
Tacit knowledge – institutional, background, in-between knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere
A big range of existing knowledge to connect to new ideas
These points also have their down sides. For example, when the system itself is changing quickly, pattern recognition erodes; you can become mistakenly confident in old patterns and miss genuinely new ones. Similarly, strong anchoring in certain tacit knowledge or other “tenure” knowledge may limit how problems are framed, potentially limiting ideas for solutions.
As late career professionals we need to balance our existing knowledge and skill with consistent and intentional engagement with the fast-paced new developments in our fields. Where can we leverage what we know and combine it with new insight to solve today’s challenges and be ready for what’s next?
Voice
“Years of experience” have value but don’t automatically convey our value to a team. This research shows that it’s also necessary to narrate our engagement with current challenges (use “voice”) with a range of “voice” tactics:
signalling specific, task-related competence
proposing solutions and making suggestions
constructively challenging peers
engaging in discussion
“Voice” is also an opportunity to translate our years of experience into current value through ideas, foresight, and energy. Our career experience enriches what we’re discovering in the changing professional landscape and how we’re developing.
The Australian researchers acknowledge this, pointing out that, “staying relevant and adaptable—by keeping up with industry trends, technological advancements, and professional developments—can enhance their [older professionals] opportunities to engage in promotive voice behavior.”
Who’s the audience?
The Australian research studied teams with relatively flat structures where the audience for “voice” was younger team-mates and alongside them, managers. But it’s worth thinking about our own wider audiences and how our “voice” conveys our current creativity, dynamism and adaptability.
Designers talk about “touch points” in the customer journey, points where the message, products, or brands interact with the target audience. Example touch points for our audiences could be in meetings (whether online or in person), at events (networking or giving talks), or on social media (e.g. LinkedIn). We can be deploying “voice” to all relevant touch points.
Speak up
Our pioneering cohort of late career professionals is buffeted by both a fast-changing societal context and lagging attitudes about older professionals. In response we can own our valuable experience (while acknowledging its limitations) and leverage it to engage in new ways with current and forthcoming challenges. And—we can speak up about it!
Sources:
“Silent struggle: How older employees’ relational age and voice behavior shape co-worker trust and performance in professional teams” by Chia-Yen (Chad) Chiu, Sanjeewa Perera, Valerie Caines in Human Relations Online First, 1–33, 2026.
Ageing and Employment OECD, undated.
The End of Predictable Progress by Kyla Scanlon, Feb 19, 2025 In Kyla’s Newsletter On Substack.
“1 in 5 Gen Zers haven’t had a single conversation with someone over 50 in their workplace in the last year, LinkedIn research says“ By Orianna Rosa Royle in Fortune.
About the Late Career Flyer
The Flyer is an occasional publication of news and observations. It’s produced by Late Career Labs which supports late career innovation.