The OECD Just Built A Tool To Unlock Your Biggest Untapped Asset

The Architect Behind the Tool

The Longevity Readiness Tool is the result of years of sustained research, and the person most responsible for building it is Shruti Singh, Senior Economist for Ageing and Employment Policies at the OECD. Singh has spent her career mapping the intersection of demographic change, labour market policy and employer practice—and the tool reflects that rare combination: rigorous evidence made genuinely usable.

In a recent conversation the 4-Quarter Lives podcast, Singh laid out the economic logic. Population ageing is not a future risk. It is a present reality already reshaping labour markets across every OECD country. The question is not whether organisations need to respond. It is whether they will do so before the costs become irreversible.

The tool Singh and her team built draws on data from more than 30 OECD countries. It is sector-comparable, practically oriented and designed to be completed without a research team. The ambition: close the gap between what the evidence shows and what organisations actually do.

The Economic Case Is Already Settled

OECD Deputy Secretary-General Fabrizia Lapecorella opened the launch with a statistic that deserves to sit at the top of every board agenda. Without meaningful increases in labour force participation among older workers, GDP per capita growth across OECD economies is projected to slow by roughly 40%—from around 1% per year in the 2010s to approximately 0.6% per year through 2024–2060. This is not a rounding error. It is a structural drag on growth—that is entirely addressable.

The workforce is ageing fast. By 2060, the size of the working-age population across the OECD is projected to fall by 8% on average—and by more than 30% in countries like Korea. Yet the organisational response remains inadequate. People 50+ account for just 9% of new hires across the OECD. Workers in their late 50s and early 60s are 30 to 40% less likely to receive training than their colleagues aged 34 to 54. Around one-third of workers face health-related limitations that affect their ability to stay employed—often because workplaces have simply not adapted.

And yet the picture is not uniformly bleak. Ivailo Kalfin, Executive Director of Eurofound, pointed out that the number of 55+ workers in European labour markets has risen by 67% over the past 15 years—from 24 million to 40 million. In some age brackets, the employment gap has effectively closed. The question is no longer whether older workers can contribute. The question is whether organisations are designed to let them. Or, even better, enable them.

Four Pillars. One Scorecard.

The Longevity Readiness Tool organises its assessment across four domains. They are the four areas where employer decisions have been shown in prior OECD research to most directly determine whether experienced workers stay in productive employment or leave prematurely.

1. Recruitment and retention: Hiring rates decline with age across the OECD—not because older candidates are less qualified, but because systems and assumptions have not been updated. Raj Verma, Chief Culture, Inclusion and Experience Officer at Sanofi, described the company’s systematic audit of all talent processes to remove age proxies—from job postings to selection criteria to development programme eligibility. His core lesson: age bias is structural, not individual. You cannot tackle it by asking people to be less biased. You have to redesign the systems that enable it.

2. Training: Access to training falls steeply with age—not because older workers cannot learn, but because employers have stopped investing in them. Murielle Arnould, Director of Organisation and Future of Work at L’Oréal, described the company’s response: over 70% of employees globally have now received AI training, including workers on the factory floor. L’Oréal’s position is explicit: 50 is a tipping point, not a terminus. Investment in employability must not wait for the pre-retirement conversation.

3. Job quality: Physically demanding roles, inflexible arrangements and poor working conditions push people out earlier than they would choose. Kalfin cited compelling European models: in the Netherlands, collective agreements in the food sector allow older workers to reduce working time to 80% while retaining 90% of salary and full pension accrual. His response to the cost question was blunt: compared to finding and training inexperienced replacements, flexible retention is the cheaper option.

4. Health and safety: Around a third of older workers face health-related limitations affecting their ability to stay employed. Where workplaces adapt—through job redesign, flexible arrangements and proactive health support—retention improves significantly. L’Oréal’s ‘For All Generations’ programme places health checkups and preventive care squarely in the framework of career sustainability, not welfare provision.

The Mindset Shift That Precedes All Others

“Experience is potential, not its opposite” noted Mathilde Thillaye du Boullay, founder of Knowldy. Age discrimination remains quietly authorised in most organisations—acceptable in ways that would be immediately recognised as unacceptable if applied to gender or race. The vocabulary of later careers—decline, exit, transition, retirement—is a vocabulary of endings. It needs to become a vocabulary of ambition, contribution, reinvention and momentum.

Jean-Yves Minet, Global Brand President for Midscale and Economy at Accor, described three shifts his sector is making:

• a better understanding of what longevity actually means (not longer life, but better daily life);
• a mindset shift from future planning to present action; and a systems shift that requires brands, businesses, governments and organisations to move together.
• Accor’s Novotel brand has built a ‘longevity every day’ strategy—organised around eating, sleeping, movement and social connection—that applies to guests and staff alike.

It is an early model of what it looks like when a large organisation treats longevity as an operating principle, not a demographic footnote.

What Good Looks Like—and What It Costs to Wait

Sanofi’s Verma offered the most practical summary of the competitive advantage at stake. At Sanofi, pharmaceutical development takes 10 to 15 years. The company needs people who can think in years, not quarters. Mixed-age teams consistently outperform on innovation. The cost of losing institutional knowledge—built over decades of navigating drug development, production and regulatory pathways—does not show up in recruitment budgets. It shows up in delayed innovation.

The panel closed with a question from an OECD colleague that went to the heart of the tension: when organisations face difficulty, older workers are typically the first to go—regardless of whatever inclusion programmes are in place. Arnould’s answer was instructive. Culture cannot be codified in processes. It is carried by experienced people. Once they leave, it leaves with them.

That recognition—that institutional knowledge is not a cost but a competitive asset—is what separates organisations genuinely designing for longevity from those treating it as a communications exercise.

The tool is now available. The benchmarks are live. The evidence has been in for years. What remains is will.