Are the most productive years of a persons life (professionally) from their 50's - 70's?

In a very general sense yes. Assuming the person raises in experience and pay scale. The longer you work for someone the more your pay increases (usually). Therefore at the end of a professional career (in Theory) the employee is making the maximum amount of income of his professional life. Playing devil's advocate.... In this day and age staying with a company for years and years is becoming a thing of the past, older higher paid positions are being replaced by lower paying personnel.(max profit for the stockholders and all) Government employment being one exception.
My opinion only of course. Good luck!

I am not thinking in terms of productivity meaning money but productivity as it relates to getting things done, especially from a leadership point of view

Thanks Piebald323 for letting me share some thoughts on this subject. I think about it a lot. I'm not an expert but being a parent I guess I want to help my kids choose the right career.

Productivity increases with age in some careers, and not in others. Leadership increases with age if the industry does not change dramatically over time.

I found some statistical data in this PDF. Page 19 is the conclusion - as a workforce ages, productivity seems to increase. http://www.mrrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/conference/pdf/Laitner-Stol yarovUM%2005-04A0805C.pdf

Interesting that every household must predict the course of technological progress over it's lifespan. Individuals that choose a career path which doesn't become obsolete over time are more productive in later years.

Borrowing from another article on the types of Human Capital:

If the industry your in goes through a massive shift in technology, much of your Knowledge Capital is lost. This happens quite often in IT. New computer languages replace old ones - almost nobody writes in Fortran or Cobol any more. Productivity goes down as programmers must learn new languages; harder to do as we get older. So being an effective leader in an industry such as IT is difficult - the kids coming out of college know more than the 40 year olds.

In some professions, Law for instance, Knowledge Capital increases over your lifespan and you will be much more productive. A career relying on Social or Track Record Capital (Sales), allows you to be much more productive and effective in later years.

http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/four_types_of_h.html

What do you think?

This answer was edited by browndog 283 days ago.

Reason: spelling