Most career transition packages look much the same. A resume refresh, LinkedIn support, interview practice, some job search coaching, over three months. For plenty of people, that is exactly right. For others, it answers a question they are not asking.
A senior manager in her late fifties, twenty-two years of service, role made redundant. She accepts the support because declining feels ungracious, then spends weeks on a resume she has not opened since the early 2000s. What she is actually turning over is whether this is the point she stops working, and how she will fill a Tuesday. Nobody asks her, and she does not raise it either.
More Australians plan to work longer. Not all of them get the choice.
Australians aged 45 and over now intend to retire at 65.6 years on average, according to ABS figures released in October 2025. Those who actually left in 2024-25 went at 63.8.
For one group the gap is much wider. Just over 6 per cent of retirees left after being retrenched, dismissed or unable to find work, at an average age of 58.3 years. That is roughly seven years short of what people say they intend. For them, redundancy did not interrupt a career. It ended one.
Why nobody says the word
This is difficult for structural reasons, not because HR is inattentive.
Asking a 58-year-old whether they are thinking about stopping can land as an assumption about their age, or as a suggestion. The employee usually will not raise it either, because saying it out loud makes it real and closes a door while they may still need the income.
AHRI's research with the Australian Human Rights Commission shows they are right to be cautious. The biggest barriers to hiring older workers are a lack of older applicants (36 per cent), salary expectations (32 per cent) and candidates having too much experience (28 per cent). Almost a quarter of HR professionals now classify workers aged 51 to 55 as older.
Both parties have reasons to say nothing, so the default fills the silence. The default is a job search.
What "next" actually looks like
Once you look, the range is wider than most programs are built for.
Another equivalent role. The most common outcome, and the right one for many. Conventional support serves this group well.
Full retirement. Stopping paid work for good. What helps is confidence in the numbers, and space to think about what replaces work: routine, purpose, people.
Winding down over a few years. Earning for another two or three years, then finishing. Often a smaller role with fewer responsibilities, which is the goal rather than a compromise.
Part-time or seasonal work. Staying in work at reduced hours, sometimes around caring responsibilities or health. Senior part-time roles exist, but sit in a different market with different channels.
Consulting. Keeping the expertise and leaving the employer behind. Suits specialists with a strong network, and depends on positioning, pricing, contracting and a first few clients.
Board and advisory work. Contributing strategically without running anything day to day. Depends on governance credentials, on understanding how appointments actually happen, and on starting where the door is open.
Volunteering or community work. Often alongside another pathway rather than instead of it. Answers what the week looks like and keeps people connected.
Starting a business. Turning a skill into something of their own, sometimes funded by the payment itself. Depends on testing the idea properly, and on realism about cash and timelines.
Still searching. Wanting an equivalent role and not yet finding one. What helps is momentum, and an open conversation about direction if months pass without traction.
What HR can do differently
The point is not to become a retirement adviser. It is to stop letting a standard package answer a question nobody asked. Five things help.
1. Look at who is affected before you scope the support. You cannot ask about retirement, but you can read your own data. Before anyone is notified you know the age, tenure and seniority profile of every affected role. If a third of those in scope are over 55 with fifteen years of service, the likely range of destinations is predictable without one sensitive conversation. Scope to that profile rather than a standard template, and do it before the announcement, not in the rushed week afterwards.
2. Widen what is on offer, and let people choose. Since the conversation often does not happen, the practical fix is support broad enough that nobody has to guess correctly in advance. Alongside resume and interview help, that can mean financial guidance, retirement planning, stress-testing a business idea, coaching for someone winding down, or help finding part-time and volunteer work. Then let people select what they use. Choice does most of the work a difficult conversation would otherwise have to do, and nobody gets steered.
3. Design the program so plans can change. Direction shifts once the market responds. Someone confident in month one about finding an equivalent role often thinks differently by month four. So ask one question when you set a program up: if this person changes direction halfway through, can they switch, or is the scope already locked? Support tied to a single pathway stops being useful at the point it matters most.
4. Match the support window to how long it actually takes. Search timelines lengthen considerably with seniority and age, so a standard three-month package often ends around the time the hardest part begins. If the budget is fixed, consider fewer components over a longer period rather than everything at once for twelve weeks.
5. Broaden how you define a good outcome. If a new job is the only result you count, your reporting will be wrong about a growing share of people. Someone who made a considered decision to retire, landed two days a week, or set up a small consultancy has been well served. Ask for reporting on where people ended up, not just how many were placed.
There is a useful precedent here. Phased retirement is one of the top three measures employers say keeps people working longer, cited by 49 per cent in AHRI's research, and the thinking behind it is well developed. Almost none of it has been applied to people leaving involuntarily, who reach the same destination with none of the same support.
The takeaway
The same package will not work for everyone, and it was never designed to.
Think back to the manager updating a resume she had not opened since the early 2000s. She was not let down by a bad program. She was handed the wrong one, politely, at the worst possible moment.
Good transition support does not try to return people to where they were. It helps them get to where they are going, even when that is somewhere nobody thought to ask about.