Retrenched in their 50s: The long road back to work for older workers

SINGAPORE: Mr Francis Lee, 59, had just celebrated closing a deal when his company told him he was being retrenched. Restructuring at his multinational packaging firm had cost him his director role.

Life went quiet after his last day of work in February 2025. “Nobody will call you. Nobody will message you,” he said. After more than 30 years of being on call for his job and seeing his colleagues more often than his friends, the silence was disorienting.

Despite having savings and receiving a “golden handshake”, Mr Lee said he could not afford to retire given the rising cost of living. He also wanted to stay active. “At this age, since I’m able to learn and able to contribute, why am I just sitting there and doing nothing?”

A mechanical engineer by training, Mr Lee had spent his working life at one company apart from a few early years. The only option in his mind was another full-time job.

For months, he kept busy by sending out job applications and taking courses in artificial intelligence, which he had not used at work. His efforts yielded only one interview – a referral from an ex-colleague – and no offers.

He dusted off the taxi driver’s licence he obtained more than 10 years ago as a back-up plan. But he stopped driving after a few months – the earnings did not justify the hours, he was too tired to apply for jobs after his shifts, and his blood sugar level had risen from sitting for long hours.

Months into his job search, Mr Lee put the brakes on looking for full-time work. He began offering his business and workflow automation skills to companies on a contract basis, or by training their employees.

More than a year after his last job, he set up his own consultancy, APAC Edge, in April and got his qualifications as a trainer in September. He is looking for his first paying client and developing his first paid course.

His experience reflects a trend flagged in the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) latest quarterly labour market report, for April to June. The ministry said workers in their 50s are at higher risk of involuntary job displacement and may face greater job search challenges.

Resident employees aged 50 to 59 had the highest retrenchment rate of any age group in the quarter, at 3.6 per 1,000 workers. Unemployment and long-term unemployment (measured at roughly six months or more) among this group edged up to 3.1 per cent and 1.2 per cent respectively in June.

Hiring has not stopped. Retrenchment in Singapore is largely driven by business restructuring – jobs for residents continue to grow, and vacancies stood at 1.48 per unemployed worker in June.

But laid-off workers, especially older ones, are taking longer to bounce back.

The proportion of retrenched residents in their 50s who found work within six months fell from 51.8 to 41.9 per cent quarter-on-quarter. This six-month re-entry rate also slowed across all age groups, from 60.7 to 54.9 per cent.

In parliament, Acting Manpower Minister Jasmin Lau said more than half of retrenched resident workers are in their 40s and 50s. Older retrenched professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs) face lower re-entry rates than other age groups at the 12-month and 24-month marks, she added.

Mr Lee and others who spoke to CNA have picked up new skills, tapped career coaches and course funding, and adjusted their expectations. Their efforts have not always paid off, as employment outcomes remain out of their control.

AN OPEN MIND

For many retrenched workers, training to upgrade skills is an instinctive reaction to job loss.

Mr Rahmat Mohamad was let go at the end of 2024, a few months into a job as a creative production manager, when the media firm he worked for ran into business difficulties. He had sought the career change after years as a logistics supervisor at a golf retailer, and after taking a specialist diploma in motion and graphic design.

Reluctant to return to logistics, the 53-year-old took courses in desktop support engineering and data science to explore a career in information technology, where he had also worked before. He used SkillsFuture funding where possible and received SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support by taking part in career workshops and consultations.

But formal training did not open doors. More than 400 applications produced no interviews. Mr Rahmat said that even with certification, employers still asked for experience for entry-level roles.

Through a referral, he returned to work in a lower-paying logistics role in March, more than a year after being retrenched. He juggled work with a professional diploma in data science, before graduating in June.

The career pivot is on hold as he settles into the job, but he still believes in keeping an open mind. "You have to keep on upgrading yourself. There's no such thing as a foolproof career," he said.

The father of three, who also cares for his wife, a kidney transplant patient, and a son with autism, said he handled his career setbacks the way he has endured other hardships.

“If one door closes, a lot of other doors will open up for you. So just stay positive. Just walk on. Just go through with it. At the end of the day, if you stay stagnant, nobody’s going to help you. You’ve got to help yourself,” he said.

TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT

Experts in adult learning said older workers are willing and able to learn, but where the training happens matters.

Informal, on-the-job training is more strongly associated with positive employment outcomes than formal vocational training, said Ms Susana Harding, senior director of the International Longevity Centre Singapore at Tsao Foundation.

“Mature and older workers are not averse to training, and they would want it to improve their employment possibilities,” she said.

“They can go for training, but some of them actually are better off getting the training while they are at work, rather than being out of work and then finding training, and then expecting to then become employed.”

Her observations draw on a 2024 survey-based study of older workers by the centre and the Singapore University of Technology and Design's Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities. It found that mature workers benefit from informal training because they can direct their own learning while solving problems at work.

The study also found that "employability" – such as contact networks and competence – was the strongest predictor of improved employment, independent of formal training.

Dr Sahara Sadik, deputy director of research at the Institute of Adult Learning, said that for those who are jobless, the networking opportunities on a course matter as much as the training, as they bring new contacts and ways to facilitate a return to work.

However, older workers have significantly lower rates of training participation. In 2025, 44.5 per cent of workers aged 50 to 64 took part in training, compared with about 60 per cent for younger age groups, according to MOM data.

Dr Sadik attributed this to factors that correspond to age, particularly education level and job features, rather than age itself. Tertiary education, a PMET job, and a job designed for generative learning – which requires learning new things and applying knowledge and skills rather than doing routine work – are more strongly associated with a higher likelihood of taking part in training.

Older workers are less likely to have received tertiary education, and this in turn shaped the roles they could enter, where PMET positions generally offer more opportunities.

“PMET jobs demand continual learning, and PMET jobs are also the ones that employers tend to leverage to drive change,” she said.

CAREER CONVERSION

One government effort is career conversion programmes run by the Skills and Workforce Development Agency. These job placements or attachments bundle structured training for the worker with salary support for the employer.

Former garment merchandiser Doris Lim was one worker who benefited. She lost her job at age 59 in 2024, when her company relocated its entire back-office operations to Vietnam.

Her first instinct was to look for jobs in the same industry where she had worked for over 30 years. But after six months with no callbacks, she widened her search.

Despite having no experience in precision manufacturing or the biomedical sector,  Ms Lim applied to Cragar, a maker of medical device parts. Now 61, she has been a senior business and data analyst for about two years after joining the company through the career conversion programme for biomedical manufacturing.

As a garment merchandiser, Ms Lim sourced raw materials, negotiated prices, coordinated within her firm to ensure garments met customer specifications and timelines, and forecast demand based on orders.

She used all these skills in her new job, though she had to adjust to industry-specific materials and timelines.

The hardest part was learning the company's products and technical standards. She put in extra hours and picked up Microsoft Power BI – a data analytics and visualisation tool – to add to her use of Microsoft Excel for data insights.

She also took a 10 to 20 per cent pay cut, but said the sector offers better career prospects than she had before. "I foresee that it's a growing industry, that I can progress from here for the next few years."

Ms Lau, the acting manpower minister, has said that close to nine in 10 mature participants were still employed 12 months after completing a career conversion programme.

“This is encouraging but reskilling alone cannot insulate older workers from future displacement, particularly in sectors undergoing rapid transformation,” she said.

Beyond the point of retrenchment, the government is looking at how older workers can stay employable throughout their careers, she said. A tripartite workgroup on senior employment, which is exploring ideas such as traineeships for older workers and fractional work, will make its recommendations this year.

“DON’T LOOK FOR A JOB, LOOK FOR WORK”

All three workers CNA spoke to believed their age likely put them at a disadvantage with employers.

In the Tsao Foundation survey, close to one in two workers aged 51 to 64 reported not being shortlisted or selected for a job due to their age, despite being qualified.

Age matters, but some hiring considerations relate more to the seniority that comes with it than to a candidate's age itself, said Mr Adrian Choo, a career coach and founder of human resource consultancy Career Agility.

“With age comes cost, comes seniority, comes a specialisation or an overgeneralisation of skills and experience,” said the former headhunter, adding that this tends to make senior hires more expensive than junior ones.

“Having said that, there is still a preference for younger workers … either from an energy standpoint or from a perception of energy standpoint,” he added.

The Workplace Fairness Act, which takes effect in 2027, lists age as a protected characteristic. Concerns have already been raised in parliament about the difficulty of proving that an employer's adverse decision was due to discrimination.

Mr Choo's advice to older jobseekers: “Don’t look for a job, look for work.”

If interviews are not producing full-time offers, candidates could make more headway by identifying specific problems that need solving in a company and offering their services on a part-time basis first, he said.

These form the building blocks of "portfolio careers", an option he commonly suggests to mature workers. Portfolio careers generate multiple streams of income from several different projects or part-time jobs, rather than one full-time position.

He acknowledged the switch is not easy. Introverted workers may find it hard to market their skills this way, and those with more generic skills may struggle to meet businesses' specific needs. Not every worker can reach "full capacity", where earnings from different projects add up to full-time pay, he said.

For Mr Lee, the former packaging firm director, it took a mindset shift and a long time to come round to the idea of a portfolio career.

But once he committed, fellow jobseekers and his coach felt he became "a different person", he said. "I'm more extroverted. I'm able to present in a much more positive way, much more confident."

In October, he facilitated his first AI hands-on training session with fellow jobseekers from The Courage Chapter, a social enterprise that champions inclusive employment for older professionals.

It brought him joy when participants got excited about applying what they learnt, he said. “At least you achieve something and you help out with something.”