The silent insecurity of senior professionals: when a successful career no longer guarantees stability

For years, we were taught that a successful career meant growing within an organization, reaching leadership positions, earning a good salary and building stability. And for many professionals, that path worked.

Today, however, there is a reality that deserves more attention: executives with outstanding track records, decades of experience and highly responsible roles who, despite everything they have built, feel deep uncertainty about their professional future.

In Chile, this concern rests on solid ground. According to a Cadem study for Caja Los Andes published in July 2026, 52% of the people over 50 who were surveyed say they have experienced age discrimination at work in the past three years. Meanwhile, a report by CIPEM at Universidad del Desarrollo, based on data from Chile's National Statistics Institute (INE), shows that people aged 50 to 59 take an average of 10.2 months to find a job.

These figures should make us reflect on how we are managing the second half of our careers.

From my experience in executive search, working with senior professionals, one thing concerns me in particular: how many highly qualified people have built successful careers but have never stopped to think about what they would do if, tomorrow, they no longer held the position they have today.

In those conversations, concerns surface that are rarely voiced in public: "I've spent 25 years working for companies and I don't know how to do anything else," "I have a good salary, but I know how hard it would be to find something similar," or "I'd like to do something on my own, but I don't know where to start."

These words reveal a striking contradiction in professionals who have led teams, managed multimillion-dollar budgets and made strategic decisions for large organizations, yet doubt their ability to build a professional future outside of them.

For decades, many have put their experience to work growing other people's businesses. They have developed knowledge, relationships and capabilities of enormous value. Yet much of that professional capital remains tied to the title, to the structure and to the backing of a corporate brand.

And when that structure disappears, their sense of their own worth can falter too.

This is where I believe we need a paradigm shift: having a great job is not the same as having professional security.

A role can disappear. A company can restructure. An industry can transform. None of this invalidates a career, but it does force us to recognize that depending on a single source of income is a vulnerability we often prefer not to look at.

Nor does it mean everyone should quit and start a business. That would be a simplistic conclusion and, in many cases, an irresponsible one.

Professional reinvention can take many forms: taking on new challenges, building new skills, joining boards, working as an advisor, offering specialized services or gradually building an independent practice.

What truly matters is starting to identify which part of our experience holds value beyond the position we hold. What problems we know how to solve, who finds that knowledge relevant, and in what other ways we could offer it to the market.

Because after 50, there are still many years of professional life ahead. And perhaps one of the biggest mistakes is waiting to lose a job before we start asking what other options we have.

I believe organizations also bear responsibility in this conversation. We need workplaces that value experience, fight age-related bias and allow for less rigid career paths.

At the same time, we as professionals must take a more active role in managing our own careers.

The experience built over 20 or 30 years should not become a source of fear in the face of change, but an asset that widens our options.

Perhaps it is time to stop asking only how to keep growing within a company and start asking something just as important: what professional future could we build if our current role ceased to exist?

Because a successful career should not be measured only by how far we got inside an organization, but also by the freedom we have built to decide what to do next.