The Legacy Chapter

Are the times chan­ging? For dec­ades, New Zea­l­and has wor­ried about the brain drain of young Kiwis head­ing over­seas. Now a grey brain drain is loom­ing: what hap­pens when hun­dreds of thou­sands of exper­i­enced New Zeal­anders walk out the office or fact­ory door?

Kiwi busi­nesses face a prob­lem that’s been poin­ted out for dec­ades, yet receives sur­pris­ingly little atten­tion: how to pre­vent dec­ades of insti­tu­tional know­ledge, rela­tion­ships, and hard-won exper­i­ence being lost when senior employ­ees retire.

With the young OE types, there’s a sense they’ll even­tu­ally return to charm­ing God­zone - or that they’re leav­ing at the entry-level end of the spec­trum, so the eco­nomy can absorb it.

Oldies, though? Once they leave, they’re not com­ing back.

It’s a trend accel­er­at­ing rap­idly. Stats NZ projects that one in five Kiwis will be 65 or older by 2030. Line that up against per­sist­ent skills short­ages, suc­ces­sion chal­lenges, and the tra­di­tional OE, then senior work­ers become even more of a busi­ness golden oldie.

The core dilemma isn’t simply that older employ­ees retire; how the trans­ition from older worker to younger unfolds.

It’s com­plic­ated.

You don’t want a 70-year-old occupy­ing a key oper­a­tional job indef­in­itely if that pos­i­tion needs new blood and a clear path­way for the next gen­er­a­tion com­ing through.

Con­versely, a good busi­ness won’t want to biff a 70-year-old’s judg­ment, con­tacts, and insti­tu­tional memory out the door based purely on their date of birth.

Mov­ing an older leader into advis­ory, part-time, or ment­or­ship roles requires a delib­er­ate frame­work design, oth­er­wise both the busi­ness and employee struggle to nav­ig­ate the shift. But busi­ness is more struc­tured than that, staff like to know who is the boss of who.

Many work­places tend to retain an all-or-noth­ing mind­set - offer­ing full-time roles or com­plete exit, rather than struc­tured, flex­ible off-ramps.

But instead of retir­ees fall­ing off a sud­den cliff, what should the final 5-10 years of a career actu­ally look like?

Auck­landers Claire Lyons and Fiona Mog­ridge have spot­ted the dis­con­nect and launched The Leg­acy Chapter - a trans­ition pro­gramme designed to help organ­isa­tions man­age the final chapter of an employee’s career.

An asso­ciate engage­ment and change advisor, Lyons was made redund­ant in 2025 after 24 years with the same employer.

Speak­ing to the Sunday Star-Times ,the pair say solv­ing this issue is good for busi­ness, for the eco­nomy, and will provide social and men­tal health bene­fits for older work­ers. Win, win, win.

“This is about recog­nising that the last years of some­body’s career can be some of their most valu­able,” Mog­ridge says.

“They have accu­mu­lated judg­ment, rela­tion­ships and know­ledge that may have taken dec­ades to build. The oppor­tun­ity is to use that period delib­er­ately - for them and for the people com­ing through behind them.”

While Stats NZ high­lighted a demo­graphic shift toward older work­ers as far back as 2006, struc­tured solu­tions as to how to best employ them have been slower to emerge, she argues.

Treas­ury reports nearly half (49%) of New Zeal­anders aged 65 to 69 are now par­ti­cip­at­ing in the labour mar­ket, up from around 10% in 1993.

Among 70 to 74-year-olds, par­ti­cip­a­tion has risen from 4% to 27%. Treas­ury says the increase in older-worker par­ti­cip­a­tion has been “much more sig­ni­fic­ant than anti­cip­ated” and has helped off­set the eco­nomic and fiscal effects of an age­ing pop­u­la­tion.

Older New Zeal­anders are not just more likely to be work­ing; they make up a much big­ger slice of the work­force. Their share of the labour force has risen from about 1% in 1991 to 6% today, accord­ing to Treas­ury.

So, they’re an increas­ingly import­ant part of the work­force.

But work­ing on isn’t solely about money. Accord­ing to the Retire­ment Com­mis­sion, older work­ers seek social con­nec­tion, pur­pose, a sense of worth, and flex­ib­il­ity.

Fin­an­cial real­ity plays a role: Retire­ment Com­mis­sion research shows 40% of those aged 65+ have vir­tu­ally no income other than NZ Super, another 20% have only slightly more, and nearly 1 in 3 can’t afford to retire without con­tinu­ing to work.

The old model of work­ing full-time until 65 and abruptly step­ping into retire­ment is going the way of the dino­saur. Busi­nesses and older work­ers both stand to gain from a man­aged trans­ition.

Back in 2016, an age­ing-work­force forum iden­ti­fied clear cor­por­ate bene­fits to reten­tion: pre­serving spe­cial­ised expert­ise, facil­it­at­ing struc­tured ment­or­ing, redu­cing staff turnover, and main­tain­ing cli­ent ser­vice con­tinu­ity.

“We shouldn’t get to some­body’s farewell func­tion and sud­denly real­ise we’re say­ing good­bye to 40 years of know­ledge,” Mog­ridge argues. “By then it’s too late. The oppor­tun­ity is in the years before that - to cel­eb­rate it, trans­fer it and leave both the per­son and the organ­isa­tion stronger.”

Visit www.thelegacychapter.co.nz