Why the Future of Work Depends on Valuing Experienced Talent with Lisa Taylor

What if the biggest disruption to work isn’t AI, automation, or hybrid models—but a 100-year-old idea about when careers are supposed to peak and decline?

In episode 868, Pauline James speaks with Lisa Taylor, CEO of Challenge Factory, about why traditional career models are fundamentally broken in a world where many people will live well into their 80s and beyond. Together, they unpack how outdated assumptions about age, productivity, and “career ladders” quietly undermine engagement, waste talent, and accelerate disengagement—especially in midlife.

Lisa explains how the concept of retirement at 65 was created for a very different era, why career conversations often disappear after age 49, and how manager bias—not performance—drives perceptions of declining productivity among experienced workers.

The conversation also explores the idea of the “talent escalator”—and what happens when senior leaders reach the top with nowhere meaningful left to go. Lisa shares what progressive organisations are doing differently: designing roles beyond the final rung, enabling intergenerational mentorship, and creating space for purpose, contribution, and renewal across longer working lives.

For individuals feeling stuck or ready to pivot, Lisa offers a practical alternative to the traditional CV-first approach—starting instead with purpose, strengths, values, and market relevance.

This is a must-listen for HR leaders, executives, and professionals rethinking careers, longevity, and the future of work.

Key Topics Covered

• Why retirement at 65 no longer makes sense in a world of 82+ year life expectancy
• Midlife as a distinct and valuable career stage—not a decline
• The role of manager bias in perceived productivity drops
• Why career development conversations often stop too early
• The “talent escalator” and how it jams at the top
• Intergenerational teams, mentorship, and cultural ambassadorship
• Why engaging older workers can reduce youth unemployment
• A scientific, hypothesis-driven approach to talent strategy
• Rethinking career pivots, entrepreneurship, and longer working lives

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Series Setup
• 1:00 Meet Lisa Taylor And Challenge Factory
• 2:06 Corporate Origins Of A Career Mission
• 6:16 Retirement At 65 Meets 82-Year Lifespan
• 10:35 Midlife As A New Life Stage
• 13:02 Stereotypes, Bias, And Manager Perception
• 17:02 Age As A Poor Proxy For Potential
• 19:24 Work As Society’s Intergenerational Hub
• 21:12 The False Zero-Sum Of Jobs Across Ages
• 24:06 It’s Never Too Late To Pivot
• 26:12 Internal Mobility And Hidden Skills
• 27:57 The Broken Talent Escalator
• 30:12 What Leading Employers Do Differently
• 32:06 Start With Data, Hypotheses, Pilots
• 34:02 Individual Career Design Before Resume
• 36:08 Entrepreneurship As A Real Path
• 37:24 Where To Find Lisa And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talented zets, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

SPEAKER_03: 0:25

Hello, I'm Pauline James, CEO of Anchor HR and associate editor of the HR Gazette. For too long, careers have been described as if they peak and then they wind down, but life doesn't follow a script, and neither should our careers. The next chapter explores the choices, opportunities, and inspirations that emerge as we continue to shape our careers and lives. Whether that means continuing to grow and build our careers, mentoring, reinventing, giving back, or choosing new priorities. It's about defining success on our own terms. We're opening this series by speaking with Lisa Taylor. Lisa Taylor is CEO of Challenge Factory, an internationally trusted advisory and research firm focused on the future of work. She supports organizations and policymakers in understanding labor market dynamics and using career development to drive productivity and workforce advantage. A sought-after speaker, columnist, and author, Lisa has written extensively on career development and the future of work, including the talent revolution, longevity, and the future of work. Her work has been widely recognized, including being named one of Canada's top 100 women by the Urban Land Institute and an outstanding career leader by Career Professionals of Canada. We are lucky to have her insights on today's podcast. Lisa, your body of work and the recognition you've received speaks volumes to both your expertise and the passion that you bring to this field. Can you share how you came to have such a deep interest in the intersection of the future of work and career planning?

SPEAKER_02: 2:06

It comes out of my personal experience in a large corporate setting. I ran a large team. I had 135 staff. I was in my early 30s, and the average age on my team was 48, and they had been with the company 18 years. And as a younger manager on a senior leadership team, I had access to all kinds of tools and programs and approaches and conversations that I was supposed to be having. And what I found with my amazing, talented, committed, passionate team who liked the work that they were doing and had great customer engagement and employee engagement scores, everything on all of the diagnostics would say this was a high-performing team that was doing really well. When I would start to get into conversations with them about their own careers and their own future, everything would grind to a halt. We would end up in these weird conversations where they would say, Well, I only have to wait another eight years and then my mortgage would be paid off, or Lisa, I only have to wait six years and then my youngest will be finished in higher education. And then I can start to imagine what I wanted to do next. So again, average age 48, age and stage, they were all deciding that they just needed to get through a relatively long period of time, you know, six years, eight years, 12 years, 15 years. They all knew how long they needed to get through, which fascinated me as well. And when I asked them, when I said to them, okay, so let's pretend that today is the day. Your mortgage is paid off, your kids have graduated from wherever they are in higher education. And now you actually have the space and ability to determine what you want to do next. How are you going to decide? And no one knew. And so that early indication among this amazing team who were smart and creative and able to solve really challenging problems in the world, but really didn't have the tools and methodology to understand how to solve their own future career and life planning got me thinking about if this is universally true and if we have a growing number of people that are going to be living and working longer, what is the impact on productivity, on workplace wellness for my team, for the company, for our province, for the country? So it was from that original team that I really started to dig into the formal field of career development and understanding the dynamics of what was going to be impacting labor markets and the future of work, and became so convinced that this disruption was going to be real. I decided that I was going to leave my corporate career and launch one of the first businesses focused in this area in North America. Challenge Factory launched in 2009, just with me. It was incorporated with a team by 2012. And now in 2025, we are recognized for our work in this space all around the world.

SPEAKER_01: 5:27

The HR Chat Podcast is one of the world's most popular shows, offering insights and tips from HR pros, business leaders, industry influencers, and tech experts. World of work topics covered include HR tech, AI, leadership, talent, recruitment, employee engagement, wellness, DEI, and company culture. Check out the latest HR chat episodes on your podcast platform of choice and read the latest articles at HRgazette.com.

SPEAKER_03: 5:56

In your book, The Talent Revolution, you eloquently lay out that the future of work and career models are being significantly disrupted based on demographics of the workforce and longevity. Can you walk us through what is driving this disruption and also what makes it urgent?

SPEAKER_02: 6:17

So there's just a couple of facts that form the foundation for us to be able to have any kind of conversation on what's really happening. The first starting point that is really important for everyone to be grounded in is when this concept of retirement at age 65 came to be. It was the 1930s when the US enacted the Social Security Act and Canada followed around the same time, which put a marker both in reality and also in our mindset of when we should be considering people retired or of retirement age at 65. That's when you started to become eligible for Social Security benefits. And life expectancy in the year that was enacted was 62. So retirement age is set at three years past life expectancy. And that's because it was originally, as a concept, brought in in order to be a kindness to prevent people who didn't have any other means to support themselves from working themselves to death. It was a recognition that at some point in time you do actually need to retire. The dictionary definition of that word is to withdraw or to conclude. You retire to bed in the evening. You don't retire to a party or to a vacation. So it needed the space for people to be able to withdraw and conclude their commercial activities. And because of that, they needed some kind of support in some cases. So what's happened since that time is we have moved from having a 62-year life expectancy to an 82-year life expectancy. In one generation, we've gained 20 additional years of life. But our mental model is still frozen in time as if it is still the 1930s when we think about our working life expectancy. And our retirement expectations are no longer pegged at three years past life expectancy. And maybe that was never the right exact place to put it. But 20 years or 23 years before the end of life is probably also not ideal. And that's why it's urgent because as more and more individuals are moving through this cycle, and this first generation is approaching retirement with these longer lifespans. By 2030, the first baby boomers will have all turned 65. As we move through this very first cycle of experiencing both retirement and longer lifespans, what is not being recognized is that midlife has not just become a whole lot longer. But in around our 50s, we actually shift into a new segment of life. That shift is just as significant as the shift that we make when we move from childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood. But there isn't this recognition that there's a new segment of life, just as millions and millions of people are experiencing this for themselves. And so that causes enormous dysfunction. It causes high unemployment among older workers that want to be productive and viable and gainfully employed and contributing. It means that we don't use talent that is available within our society to solve some of the hardest problems. We almost are invisible and say, like, I wish there was someone who could help us with this, and they're sitting right there. And it puts pressure on individuals to solve this for themselves. It means that individuals, one by one by one, have to come to the realization that they don't feel like their age, that 60 is actually the new 40, and that they're going to forge new paths. Meanwhile, it is widespread and common that everyone is forging new paths. There is no reason for people to feel like they need to do it alone or do it on their own. It is happening across society. And even in our language, 60 is the new 40 implies there's something wrong with being 60. And there is nothing wrong with being 60 and being active and vibrant and productive and wanting more at 60, the same way we imagine was the case when we were 40. And just on that, because I find it always kind of amusing, I have lived through my 40s. I'm now in my 50s, and I can tell you that I would not want to go back to my 40s. That was a crazy sandwich generation time of young kids, and there is a lot that goes on in your 40s. So if 60 is the new 40, that does not sound like a good prescription for how life gets better as we age. I would much rather a happy, vibrant, productive 60s rather than going back and reliving eras in our past.

SPEAKER_03: 11:20

Thank you, Lisa. And I love that call out because we think of what we say to the teens in our life, the 20-year-olds, that we wouldn't want to go back and live through that phase again. I just think it's such a healthy anecdote to embrace the 50s and the lessons learned and the opportunities that are ahead of us.

SPEAKER_02: 11:38

When you know who you are, you understand how the labor market is shifting, you know the work learning and life roles that you want to play and that you're evolving into, you can make the kinds of choices that set you up for the kind of life that you want. And that's not prescriptive where it's going to be the same for every single person. It often, almost always, includes continuing a vibrant, productive, purposeful work. It is terribly disruptive for individuals, for sense of identity, for purpose, for communities, for social cohesion, for social isolation to push people out of workplaces decades before they need to be taking care of their own personal affairs. The economic impact of not getting this right is enormous. And the individual impact of feeling overlooked, invisible, or like you've lost your purpose is also disastrous. So it is urgent for us to solve this because it is impacting our society and it is impacting us as individuals.

SPEAKER_03: 12:49

Thank you. Related to that, in your work, you dismantle common stereotypes about workers of a certain age, being the office curmudgeon, being resistant to change. Can you tell us what the research says and what you're actually observing?

SPEAKER_02: 13:06

The stereotypes that exist within organizations and how older workers are portrayed, a lot of that comes from how older workers are treated. So the research shows that the decline in productivity that happens among older workers is entirely dependent on the perception of their manager. So it's actually not a real productivity decline. Older workers are actually more productive than younger workers, but the perception of their productivity entirely hinges on whether their manager believes that older workers are less productive than younger workers. So it's a bias that exists within management that then ends up perpetuating itself as a stereotype across the workforce. As I said, the research shows for all kinds of reasons, older workers are actually more productive than younger workers, despite the fact that they have this reputation. And then we get into, you know, you use the word curmudgeon and kind of the personality traits. Our research shows that meaningful, future-focused career conversations and development conversations slow down or stop in Canada and the US is about the same at around age 49. So by the time someone is 59, nobody has shown any interest in their future, their growth, their skills, or their development for 10 years. If we had a 39-year-old employee that nobody had paid any attention to since they were 29, they would also be a little grumpy and disengaged and not excited and on the leading edge of the latest and greatest that's coming out with the organization. So a lot of this comes back again, not to characteristics that are based on how many days you've lived on the planet. After you've lived on the planet a certain number of days, you become a curmudgeon. That's not the way that this works. What actually happens is the interest that others show in you, their perceptions of you and the bias that they have in what they think you're capable of actually leads you to fulfill on what they're putting out there. If they're going to disengage and treat you like you don't have an exciting future within the organization, you're going to respond in kind. And so the good news about that is there are really easy ways that we can create really vibrant, productive, successful, profitable organizations that offer choice, opportunity, and agency over how people continue to navigate in their own career that's appropriate for each and every life stage within our workforce.

SPEAKER_03: 15:54

Thank you, Lisa. I really appreciate you underlining the psychological impact of someone feeling invisible in the workplace, of not having their talents tapped into. It relates to the leadership training and discussions we often have and how we note that people need attention, they need involvement the way plants need sunshine to thrive. With that, you note that someone's age is an unreliable measure of where they're at in their career. Can you tell us more about that?

SPEAKER_02: 16:29

Yeah. So again, you know, the number of days that someone has been on the planet is a poor indicator of almost anything. There is a growing uh population of people in their 20s and 30s that are exhibiting chronic health conditions and that are needing time and space and care and benefits to address health-related issues. And there is a growing number of very healthy, productive, vibrant, successful 60, 70, and even 80-year-olds as we grow into our own longevity. So the assumptions that we have that someone at a certain age is going to be appropriate for certain work or a certain job is really an outdated way of thinking about our workforce. And certainly now that we have these longer work years and people navigate through different stages of their career and move from learning to work to learning again to work again to taking a break to coming back to the workforce. We have these fluid career patterns that get treated as if they're the exception. But actually, if you were to look overall at the patterns of how people are navigating work in life are actually the norm, it becomes important for us to recognize what organizations need in terms of the workforce structures that will serve their organizations best? And what do individuals need in order to be able to navigate their own careers in ways that honor what they're looking for and what they need from work. That's not just financial, but all of the aspects of benefits and uh positive implications with being a part of communities, achieving goals together, and restructuring how we think about things so that we're designing intergenerational workforces and intergenerational programming that addresses the business needs as opposed to continuing down the path that we currently are on, which segments the ages within our workplaces. So work is actually one of the only places in society that people of all ages come together to pursue common goals with people they have not necessarily selected to do that with. When we look at social cohesion and what's happening in our society, work is the place that people mix with people from all different backgrounds and stripes and views and all kinds of diversity of thought as well as diversity of identity. We have structured ourselves out of that in the rest of society. We have seniors housing and student housing. You know, the local community center has swim for young families and for people under 18 and for people over 65. We keep ourselves in separate spaces everywhere else except for work. And so there is a role and a real opportunity for workplaces to be that intergenerational hub and engine that keeps us moving forward as a cohesive society that I think is a missed opportunity when we put so much emphasis on well, what age and stage is someone at when we're looking at what opportunity we want to give them.

SPEAKER_03: 19:49

Thank you. I appreciate you highlighting the benefits of supporting that cohesion and also dismantling some of the more damaging stereotypes. If the youth really wanted to be radical, they Could not dump on the generation behind them. You've also called out a false narrative that older people need to leave the workforce in order to create room for the younger generation.

SPEAKER_02: 20:11

Yeah, it is widespread in society today that we like to have sides, that we like to set up this side is against that side. And so often the dialogue is in mainstream media and stories. There's always a bit of an angle on where are older workers hurting the careers of younger workers. And I think it's really important to acknowledge and recognize that ageism and a weird relationship that Western society has with age at all ages. So younger people in workplaces experience ageism, and older people in workplaces experience ageism. And it's actually quite interesting to notice that there's no common bond over the common experience, that each group believes that they uniquely are experiencing it and inflict it on the other without necessarily recognizing that it's actually the same thing. The narrative that older workers need to leave the workforce in order for there to be space for younger workers in a time when we have high youth unemployment feels like a super logical argument to make. But it is an entirely misread and misunderstanding of how the labor market actually works. It basically leans into the assumption that the labor market is like a pizza and there's only so many slices. So if an older worker is taking a slice, that means that there isn't a slice for a younger worker to take. It means that there is at any point in time a fixed number of jobs that we're allowed to have within our economy. It's simply not true. We can have unlimited jobs. That's actually why entrepreneurship of all ages is such an important feature of how Canada, in particular, in our economy, continues to grow, because we need new ventures and employment and productivity to come from new jobs being created. What the OECD research shows, what all kinds of economic research shows, is that actually when older workers remain engaged in the workplace, youth unemployment drops. The effect is actually the opposite of what the narrative commonly is. And that's because when older workers are gainfully employed and employed using the skills that they have amassed over the decades of work that they have done, their work is complex enough that it will pull younger workers in to work with them as they do their work. So proper engagement and employment, not sidelining older workers and keeping them engaged at the level of expertise that they have amassed actually helps reduce youth unemployment, even in this AI era. And that's a, of course, a whole new layer to this discussion that Challenge Factory is very active and engaged in. But if we're serious about solving the issue of youth employment, we need to be looking at how successful our older workers actually are in generating that productivity and those jobs and those new innovations in order to pull youth into the market with them.

SPEAKER_03: 23:34

Thank you. You know that the value of older workers goes well beyond our ability to transfer knowledge. What career opportunities are being shut down or potentially overlooked even by the individual themselves unnecessarily?

SPEAKER_02: 23:50

This is true at all ages and stages. We hear 25-year-olds, 36-year-olds, 47-year-olds, 62-year-olds. The common kind of belief about their career and where they're at is that they are too late to make a change. In your 20s, I chose this path. I either went to higher education or I didn't. And if I did, I chose this major and now I can't change to move into something else. It's too late. I've got to continue. That continues all the way through. In my 30s, I've had a decade into this career. It would be way too disruptive for me to make a change. And so we kind of just hang out in the career paths and patterns or belief of what's available to us with this perception or this fallacy that it's too late to make a change. And the reality is work is changing all the time. The skills that you use to do the exact same job now is totally different than the skills that you use to do that exact same job 10 years ago. So you are changing. You are having to adapt and change all the time. The average longevity with companies, I believe, is now down to less than two years, especially among the younger workforce. Two years is not decades and lifetime of commitment. And so everybody has the opportunity to think about what they want from their work, learn something new, and transition into that new state of where they want to be that matches their current life stage. You don't need to stick with the choices you made in your 30s because you chose to be an accountant and now you're in your 60s and you can only be an accountant. That is really a failing in our systems of career literacy and a lack of understanding of our own human potential, but also what the labor market needs of us.

SPEAKER_03: 25:49

Thank you. It's very inspiring to think of the opportunities that are ahead of us and to think about it in a much more expansive way rather than feeling like our options are getting narrower and narrower as we progress through our career.

SPEAKER_02: 26:04

It happens in organizations too, right? So the labor market is a true market. There's labor supply, which are the people that are working, and there's labor demand, which are the people that hire people. And so while it's true that we limit our own possibilities, employers also limit the potential of their own internal workforce. And we know going into 2026 that internal mobility is a hot topic and one that is at the top of strategic mandates and thinking that's going on among leadership teams. And if we don't actually understand the full spectrum of capability that exists inside of our own organization, but we want to prioritize internal mobility, it's like playing a game missing half of the pieces. It's not really going to get us to the goal and no one's going to win.

SPEAKER_03: 26:56

Thank you. I really appreciate your model of the broken escalator. And it's not your typical corporate ladder. You join the workforce, you get on the escalator, time's moving, and you're moving along this timeline up the escalator. And maybe you move up a step, maybe someone moves up two steps if there's opportunities available within the organization. But you know that those opportunities don't always exist. That's where people leave. The top of the escalator was designed for the 65-year retirement age. It flattens. And people who remain in the workforce are essentially now on a treadmill. I keep stepping back in order to remain engaged. And at the same time, there's these organizational cues that time is up, clock is ticking, you know, we're waiting for you to free up space. People are making the decision to stay in the workforce longer. So just welcome your perspective on this disconnect, how organizations can remedy it, organizations that are doing this well, what are they doing differently?

SPEAKER_02: 27:59

Yeah, I love that you did such a great job of describing the broken talent escalator. So as they're on that top step, which is flattened and they're choosing, they don't want to step off. Instead, they're going to choose to take a step back and they're going to ride a treadmill all day. It is wildly boring. And that gets us a little bit into some of the disengagement that we then see. One of the reasons why people will choose to ride a treadmill is because they know who they are when they're on that treadmill. They have a title that they can describe or they can introduce themselves with at a cocktail party or when they're meeting new people or when they're in their community. They have an identity that's been built around the work that they do. If they step off that escalator and there isn't a legacy career path for them, there aren't other roles that they can step into. And there are lots of people who say we should not be tying our sense of identity to the work that we do, that as human beings, we are far more valuable than that. I 100% believe that. And I a hundred percent believe that we tie our identity to the work that we do. We introduce ourselves by our job title, you know, on a daily or weekly basis for decades. We say I am an accountant, I am the senior vice president of XYZ department, I work in this industry. If we say that over and over and over again through our entire life, it becomes a part of who we are. And unless there is an answer that allows me to feel comfort that I am going to continue to have an identity, that I am not going to disappear or fall off a cliff, and that there will be a way for me to have purpose and respect and meaning in what I'm going to be doing next. For most people, taking that step off the treadmill at the top step feels too risky. And so they stall on that top step and cause a treadmill effect on all of the steps all the way down the escalator. And that's just because the escalator is too short. It just doesn't provide them with options of where they can be moving and where they can be going. You asked what good organizations or leading organizations do in this space. The first is that they have roles that come after senior vice president that aren't upwardly mobile within the executive structure, but actually allow people to get back to the frontline kinds of work that they really love doing. Or they have other ways that they engage older workers that are appropriate for what the older workers actually need and want out of their work now, as opposed to assuming that they're going to want to continue doing exactly what they've been doing. And the other thing that they do as well is they recognize that if they are going to have mentorship programs where older workers are going to be paired with younger workers, their older workers had better be really good cultural ambassadors for the type of organization that they are in. That pairing someone who is stuck on a treadmill with a younger person is a recipe for young people to leave your organization because it's clearly not a place that you want to grow old. And so thinking about how you can leverage intergenerational relationships to strengthen your company means that you need to address the career-related issues at every stage of the talent escalator. This isn't just about how can we make things better to deal with our new graduate or recent higher retention rates. If you have an issue with younger worker retention, our research shows you almost certainly have an issue with older worker engagement. The workforce is a system. The talent escalator is a system. And when it's broken, you need to look at the steps above the step that's actually exhibiting the signs of breaking.

SPEAKER_03: 31:47

Thank you. Lisa, if an organization's feeling behind, what would you suggest as their first steps?

SPEAKER_02: 31:55

So I think that data is your friend. In the future of work, things are changing all the time. And we also don't have all the resources. We don't have all the money, the people, the technology, the data. We never have all of the pieces. And we need to take a scientific approach. And the scientific approach says we don't know the answer to these questions, but we have some hypotheses. So what do we imagine could be happening within our organization, our industry, our region? There's so many different dynamics. The US-Canada trade situation and tariff situation. What hypotheses do we have about what might happen next? And then what information do we need in order to start to structure some experiments to test whether we're right or not? And let's learn as we go and adapt as we go. What pilots would we want to run to see how we might do things differently? There's data that you can collect across the entire talent escalator. Challenge Factory has ROI tools and methodologies. We have all kinds of ways that organizations can kind of work through lists of what would be good information to be able to have to make better, smarter strategic decisions.

SPEAKER_03: 33:09

Thank you. And I presume also paying attention to the discussions that leaders are having with employees across their career as well, and hopefully helping to dismantle assumptions going into those conversations.

SPEAKER_02: 33:24

Challenge Factory puts together a lot of resources so that frontline managers can pick something up today and make a difference in the career conversation that they're having with their frontline staff, because that is where everything is happening. And those managers often don't have full and complete information based on the strategy of where you're heading and what you're intending to do next, and still have to have positive, future-focused conversations with their staff. And so the more that you can be supporting them to do that, while some of the really big, thorny discussions and hypotheses are being tested at the strategic level and at the organizational level, the stronger the organization will be.

SPEAKER_03: 34:06

With the breadth of work that your organization undertakes and the strategic guidance it provides, you also provide career counseling to individuals. And based on that, I'm wondering if I can squeeze in a question where I ask you for the advice that you would have for individuals who may actually be interested in ramping up in their career, but they feel like they are marching in place at the top of that broken escalator.

SPEAKER_02: 34:30

We have a tool that's available online that gets people to take a step back and do some good career exploration. Often when people are looking to make a change, they don't go to formal career development or career guidance methodologies and tools. They ask their uncle, they get advice from their coworker, they hear about something that someone else is doing and think maybe they could do it, or they start with their resume. Your resume is actually one of the last places you should be focusing if you want to make a career change. And that's because your resume is a marketing document for a product, which is you, that you are selling your services to a particular buyer, which is the employer. And if you don't know what you want to do, or how your skills from the past relate to that in a meaningful way, or who your buyer is, no marketing agency in the world would accept that brief. They wouldn't start by writing the. They would want to do a lot more exploration and understanding of exactly what the product is and what its unique value proposition is, and then who are they targeting in terms of where that document is going to go. So the same is true for anyone at any age and stage that finds that they may be interested in exploring what their next step is. And that step back requires a deeper exploration and understanding of what you need from your work. And you're allowed to include things you want in that category, where your unique talents are, what do you care about? What lights you up? What are you passionate about? What always piques your interest when the conversation comes up? And then the last component is where is the market or what impact do you want your work to have? Impact just means that you do something and someone recognizes it, for example, by paying you for that. So those four domains, what do you need and want? What are you talented in? What do you care about? And where are there market or labor or impact opportunities for you to be able to have an influence? Gives you a set of criteria, doesn't give you a job, but it gives you the list of things that you'd like to have satisfied. And that's your sweet spot. That's the starting point. And until you know that, you can't possibly write a resume that's actually going to resonate or know the full spectrum of jobs that are actually available to you. We are aware of only the jobs we have intersected with in the past. And there is a whole lot of work that needs to be done using the talents you already have that is totally different than what you've ever thought of before, but viable and possible and not that risky for you to move into.

SPEAKER_03: 37:14

Thank you, Lisa. Really appreciate that guidance to don't begin by looking at what you did in the past. Begin by looking inwards about what really lights you up and what excites you as your first step. It's practical and it's inspiring. And I presume entrepreneurship is something that you may also encourage someone to consider or encourage the market at large to do a better job of promoting.

SPEAKER_02: 37:38

Of course. Entrepreneurship, as we were talking earlier, is really important for productivity of our nation. Canada needs to do a better job on it. We need to have better awareness that entrepreneurship is not a fallback career when you don't end up in a formal job. It actually is the engine that drives productivity in the market and in our labor markets. Entrepreneurship is a vehicle to meet criteria if you already know what you want to do. It is a method or a mechanism for how you bring your talents to the world.

SPEAKER_03: 38:11

Thank you. I'm really grateful for your thoughtful work that is also practical for those who want to learn more. What's the best way to follow your work? What's the best way to connect?

SPEAKER_02: 38:25

Yeah, so Challenge Factory has a website. It's challengefactory.ca. There's a newsletter sign up there at the bottom of the page. It goes out every Wednesday. So you get little tidbits and tips from us every Wednesday if you sign up. Um, I'm also on LinkedIn. My handle there is author Lisa Taylor, and I'm super happy to connect anytime. Thank you, Lisa.

SPEAKER_03: 38:48

I'm grateful for your time. My pleasure. Thanks for the good questions. This conversation with Lisa Taylor really highlighted how much careers are shifting as people work longer and rethink what later career success can look like. I so appreciate how she challenges the stereotypes that can hold experienced talent back and shows how organizations can rethink roles, conversations, and leadership to better support people at every stage. I'm Pauline James, and this is the next chapter. I'd love to hear if Lisa's insights have prompted you to think differently about your own path or your organization's approach to talent. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or through our Anchor HR community. Thanks for listening and join me next time as we continue exploring what the next chapter of work and life can look like.

SPEAKER_00: 39:58

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