Longevity, Learning & The Future of Work. So goes the theme for this 6thCentury Summit presented by The Longevity Project in collaboration with the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, and you can sign up right now for your 2-Day VIRTUAL attendance Feb. 17 & 18, 2026. Only a short nine weeks away, it’s a good way to jump start your learning program for a new year as I have done previously, though now a month earlier.
Reviewing the agenda outline, it was good to see that the content flow in this edition of the Century Summit is better composed than the last one, for here learning is the strongest thread. Right from the opening session the question is posed: What if longevity and learning weren’t separate worlds? As the agenda flows into its second day we land at Centering People in the Future of Work and Learning and the question of integrating lifelong learning into our longer working lives.
All this and more laid out in the agenda brought back memory to the late 1990’s & early 2000’s, to when, as a career consultant, the same conversations could be heard around lifelong learning, the future of work and rethinking retirement. Most of my work back then included designing programs for audiences of workers in transition, exploring options for later life career decisions. It will be interesting to see in this Century Summit how much has shifted in that narrative.
One of the speakers I noted on the list at this summit is Peter Cappelli. An accomplished author and leading thinker on human resource matters in the workplace, the one book I have in my library is The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce (1999); so let’s see what he brings full circle to the conversation. The futurist in me wonders to what extent the incursion of AI in the workplace and its impact on lifelong learning will find its way in this Longevity Summit.
Over time newer voices have taken up the mantle to further this narrative of longevity, lifelong learning and the future of work. One of the speakers I know at this Summit is Canada’s Mehbs Remtulla – Founder of What’s neXT50 (2019), a globally networked community/social venture created to connect business professionals in their later life transitions with new ways of working with purpose, building multigenerational relationships and engaging in lifelong learning.
For the past three years Mehbs has also been an Ambassador for the Stanford Center on Longevity, and one of the parts he has played over that time is that of a judge in the center’s Longevity Design Challenge competition where the 2024/25 theme was “Reimagining Education and Learning for Long Lives”. As it happens the finalists for the 2025/26 Design Challenge will be announced on Jan. 26, 2026. My 13th annual report on that will continue then.
Postscript. As a reminder here are two other Stanford initiatives and platforms I have participated in over the last few years – Longevity Book Cluband Century Lives Podcast.
