In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Victoria Tomlinson, founder and CEO of Next-Up, to talk about her new book, Expiry Date Never, and the systems quietly pushing experienced people out of work. Tomlinson argues the problem is not age but obsolete workplace design, and that the first thing to fix is recruitment, where candidates are screened out at 50 and increasingly at 40. She makes the case for scrapping the 50-plus label, which collapses 66 years of life into one category.
The conversation turns to AI, where hallucinated reports and expensive mistakes are, she argues, raising rather than lowering the value of experienced judgment. They close on money, purpose, and what a good transition looks like when it starts a decade early rather than a year out.
Victoria Tomlinson is the founder and CEO of Next-Up, helping professional services firms and boards turn partner/leadership retirement and succession into an advantage rather than a risk. She was previously a director at EY and ran her own communications agency for thirty years. She is an international keynote speaker, TEDx speaker (‘A Generation of Wasted Talent’), Amazon bestselling author, a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University and a Fellow of the RSA. Her new book, Expiry Date Never, written with co-author Louise Ballard, is published by Pearson in September 2026.
Useful Links:
* Expiry Date Never – Age is the New Superpower
