“You get training at every stage in life except for retirement”. This was the opening line by Helen, a volunteer who was facilitating a Planning for Your Future workshop, and around the room you could see the sentiment resonating.

You go to school to train for college or work. Once in work, you never stop training to keep abreast of health and safety, company policy or any of the myriad of ways that help you to do your job. Yet when you retire, you’re given your leaving present and off you go. For a lot of people, this means going from a structured 40 hour week to absolutely nothing. But retirement isn’t a thing you can just do, and that’s where Age Scotland can help.

Age Scotland has set out to change this by launching a new brand, Now & Next, aimed at the 50 plus age demographic and offering ‘Planning for your Future’ workshops that are interactive, relevant and thought provoking to this audience. By combining financial and legal information along with guidance on managing change and activities to identify people’s transferable skills, these Now & Next workshops allow people to plan now to be prepared for what’s next in life.

Please visit our new website – http://nowandnext.scot/ where you can now book places for workshops online and access other relevant information about our services.

There is a great video here of one of our volunteers speaking about her own experience of retirement and  How the workshops can be a great help for people.

As an additional benefit, if you are involved with the Healthy Working Lives award program you can use our workshops as evidence to help achieve a Silver award.