Why study something new after turning 40

"It's impossible to change jobs once you're in your 40s, right?"

Even in the Reiwa era, I still hear opinions like that.

Even if you can change jobs, it becomes a question of how much of a pay cut you are willing to accept, let alone career advancement, as even maintaining your current status is difficult.

Now that the lifetime employment system is collapsing (I thought about writing "it has effectively collapsed," but surprisingly, there are still many companies where retirement at the mandatory age is the norm), changing jobs after becoming a working adult has become common.

However, job hunting is only active up until one's 30s.

Changing jobs in your 40s or older is still not the norm.

At what age does the halfway point of your professional life occur?

Let's do a calculation here.

When someone who starts working after high school (first year of work at 19) and someone who starts after college (first year of work at 23) both work until age 70, at what age does each reach the halfway point of their professional career?

The correct answer is 45 and 47, respectively.

I don't believe at all that the 65-year-old retirement age will still exist by the time I turn 65.

Retirement at 70 will be the norm, and they will likely be discussing a 75-year-old retirement age.

When you calculate it this way, you realize that your 40s is the age when you are just reaching the halfway point of your professional life.

Technologies that fundamentally change the world appear quite often

With the arrival of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and the subsequent release of GPT-4 in 2023, the world has been drastically changed by generative AI.

You might think that there has hardly been any technology in recorded history that has changed the world so fundamentally... but let's look back at history a little.

The emergence of technology that fundamentally changes current society is actually not that rare.

For example, smartphones spread explosively with the arrival of the first iPhone in 2007 (in Japan, 2008).

Before that, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble and the subsequent Web 2.0 era fundamentally changed the nature of the information society.

In this way, technology in recent years has brought about 10 to 15 years of innovative changes that completely transform people's lives.

How many more 'generative AI-class changes' will I face in my professional career?

Let's think about the future after learning from history.

I am 43 years old this year.

Assuming I work until I am 70, I still have 37 years of work ahead of me.

Let's set 2023 as the first year of generative AI, which is two years ago from now.

If we consider a 15-year cycle, the next innovative technologies will emerge at the following times. My age is in parentheses.

• 2038 (56 years old)

• 2053 (71 years old)

In the case of a 10-year cycle, it would be as follows.

• 2033 (53 years old)

• 2043 (63 years old)

• 2053 (73 years old)

In other words, within my professional career, there is a possibility that I will definitely witness the emergence of a revolutionary technology on par with current generative AI at least once, and possibly twice if things go poorly.

I cannot make a living for the rest of my life with the work I am doing now.

My main profession is an IT engineer, but most of the skills I acquired when I started my career are no longer in use.

Furthermore, even the skills I excelled at 10 years ago have now become obsolete.

Due to the generative AI boom, various jobs have already been phased out, and more will continue to be phased out in the future.

I am convinced that I will experience this massive wave at least one more time.

It is impossible to continue doing the same job forever.

The meaning of studying in your 40s

Since you haven't even reached the halfway point of your professional life, and you know that major innovations capable of overturning your career are coming at least once or twice more, doing nothing is nothing short of professional suicide.

I study to survive.

This is the reason why I continue to learn.

(Thumbnail image: Unsplash photo by Hunters Race )