HIRE HER. BACK HER. KEEP HER.
MIDLIFE AT WORK
Take off your ageist blinkers and rethink your midlife talent strategy. Hire her. Back her. Keep her. Your bias is costing you. Highly experienced women in their 40s and 50s come with exceptional skills, experience and energy that will transform your bottom line and culture for the better. Inside The Midlife Talent Labs our immersive half-day and full-day workshops bring leaders, HR, talent teams and midlife women together to tackle the decisions, behaviours and unwritten rules holding progress back
CLIENTS WE've ADVISED
THE PROBLEM WE'RE SEEING
SHE'S TOO EXPERIENCED TO HIRE. TOO VALUABLE TO LOSE.
Women in their 40s and 50s with decades of experience are applying for hundreds of roles and hearing nothing back.
They're taking dates off their CVs and deleting twenty years of career to get through the first sift. The advice they're given is to hide their experience. Meanwhile, employers complain about a skills shortage.
That's age and gender bias, human or automated, turning away women who have run the budgets, led the teams and kept the clients. Your competitors are doing it too, which is exactly why the employer who stops gets the pick of the market.
The women already on your payroll aren't faring much better. AI is changing how jobs are done. Careers are getting longer. They're managing health transitions, caring responsibilities and real questions about what they want from their next 10, 15 or 20 years at work.
Most organisations have no strategy for female talent after 40, so she's left to work it out alone.
Some disengage. Some stop progressing. Some leave, taking years of knowledge, relationships and organisational memory with them.
So your organisation loses her twice. You won't hire her, and you don't keep her. That isn't a personal issue. It's a recruitment, retention, capability, productivity, leadership and culture issue.
DON'T PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND
We're here to help and advise
That's where we come in.
We help organisations turn midlife from the point where women stall or leave into the years they contribute, learn, lead and grow the most.
We work on how you hire, so experienced women stop dropping out of your recruitment process and have a reason to choose you.
We work on how she progresses, with the AI skills, leadership development and career paths that keep her growing for the next 10, 15 or 20 years.
We work on your culture, running listening sessions with the men and the women in your organisation to find out what's really going on, then giving leaders and managers specific things to do differently.
And we make sure you have a midlife talent strategy that works across generations, with two-way mentoring that pairs Gen X experience with Gen Z's ease with AI, so knowledge moves in both directions.
HIRE HER. BACK HER. KEEP HER.
Take off your ageist blinkers & rethink your midlife talent strategy. Hire her. Back her. Your bias is costing you.
TAKE ACTION NOW IF:
01
AI is changing jobs at speed, but confidence and adoption are not developing equally across the workforce.
Experienced women may understand the business better than anyone, yet still feel overlooked, anxious or left behind in the transition to AI-enabled work.
We help you drive the practical skills and confidence for your female talent to use AI in their real roles, productively, commercially, creatively and responsibly.
05
YOU SAY YOU CAN'T FIND THE TALENT, BUT WOMEN OVER 40 AREN'T MAKING YOUR interview SHORTLISTS OR GETTING THE JOB OFFERS. WHY?
Look at who you hired last year. If experienced women aren't applying, or are applying and not getting through, something is filtering them out: the job advert, the AI and human screening, the "culture fit" conversation, or an employer brand that tells her not to bother.
We help you find where she drops out, fix it, and build an employee value proposition that makes you the employer she chooses.
Women are living longer, working longer and controlling more economic resources than any previous generation of women. Yet most of the systems and businesses serving them were designed around a shorter life.
THE BIAS ISN'T UNCONSCIOUS. AND EVERYONE CAN SEE IT.
Your people already know who gets called "high potential" and who gets called "a safe pair of hands". One is a compliment and the other is a warning. That's conscious bias about gender and age, and it decides who gets hired, heard and promoted.
And it won't shift whilst the men are left out of the conversation. We show you what your culture is really doing day to day, work with the men as well as the women, and give leaders and managers specific things to do differently, so experienced women want to join you and stay.
04
AI IS CREATING A NEW CAPABILITY DIVIDE, especially for women OVER 40
02
YOU HAVE INITIATIVES, BUT NOT A SPECIFIC MIDLIFE WORKFORCE STRATEGY
You may already have menopause support, leadership programmes, wellbeing initiatives, employee networks and AI training. But they sit in different parts of the organisation and rarely address the complete midlife experience.
We connect the dots turning those separate activities into a measurable workforce-longevity strategy.
03
YOUR EXPERIENCED TALENT IS QUIETLY CHECKING OUT
Some of your most capable female talent can no longer see what progression looks like for them. They may still be performing well, but beneath the surface they are questioning their confidence, relevance, ambition or future with the organisation.
We help you re-engage that talent before disengagement becomes departure.
our services
THE MIDLIFE TALENT LAB
IMMERSIVE HALF-DAY AND FULL-DAY STRATEGY WORKSHOPS
Age and gender bias shut experienced women out of recruitment, development and promotion. Assumptions about ambition, availability and leadership potential shape who gets a chance and whose experience goes unused.
Employers prepared to challenge that bias have an opportunity: attract overlooked talent, strengthen their culture and build a reputation that gives them a competitive edge.
Longer working lives make that opportunity bigger. Midlife women have substantial careers ahead of them. Your strategy determines whether their experience builds value for your business.
Hire the female talent your competitors overlook.
Become the employer she chooses.
Accelerate the decisions.
Build the commitment.
Put the strategy to work.
Our immersive half-day and full-day labs bring leaders, HR, talent teams and midlife women together to tackle the decisions, behaviours and unwritten rules holding progress back.
HOW THE MIDLIFE TALENT LAB WORKS
Combining commercial insight with expertise in recruitment strategy, organisational culture and female leadership, we compress fragmented conversations into focused working sessions that accelerate decisions.
The people responsible for change help design the solutions challenging bias, working through competing priorities and agreeing what needs to change in how your business hires, develops and promotes midlife women. Clear decisions, shared commitment and accountability for what happens next.
Half-day and Full-day Workshops
Focus on a specific challenge or work through connected decisions across your midlife talent strategy. We shape the session around the outcomes you need and the people required to achieve them.
SHAPED AROUND YOUR BUSINESS
A Plan Your People Are Ready To Act On
- Shared business priorities.
- Practical solutions developed together
- Explicit commitments from leaders and managers.
- Named owners and agreed first actions.
- A sequenced delivery plan.
- Measures for hiring, progression, retention and women’s experience at work
WHAT YOU LEAVE WITH
Targeted delivery and fractional advisory support keep the work moving, tackle obstacles and help embed the changes.
Hire her. Back her. Keep her.
Make your reputation for valuing experience a reason talent chooses you.
STRATEGIC ADVISoR ON WORKFORCE LONGEVITY, PEOPLE & CULTURE AND THE MIDLIFE ECONOMY
CEO & FOUNDER voyage & soap
DIMPLE
STHANKIYA
Dimple Sthankiya has spent more than 25 years working alongside senior leaders, C-suites and global organisations on strategy, people, culture, employee value proposition and transformation.
Today, her work focuses on one of the most important changes shaping organisations: people are living longer, careers are extending and AI is transforming what it means to remain valuable at work.
Dimple helps leaders understand the commercial and human implications of this shift and turn that understanding into practical action.
Through Midlife at Work, she brings together workforce strategy, AI readiness, leadership, reinvention and the particular experiences of women at midlife.
Her approach is commercial, human and deliberately practical. The goal is not simply to help women remain in work for longer.
It's to make sure they keep learning, leading, progressing and contributing at their highest level, capitalising on their knowledge, skills and success so far in their careers.
FRESH THINKING. FASTER PROGRESS.
THE EXPERTISE BEHIND THE LAB
Voyage & Soap isn't built like a traditional consultancy. There's no six-month diagnostic and no 40-page report.
We work in fast, immersive, facilitated sessions. We bring together the people who own the problem and the people who live with it: leaders, HR and talent teams, managers, and the men and women on the ground. They do the work together, in hours and days instead of months, and leave with decisions made, owners named and first actions agreed.
Around those sessions, we bring in fractional expertise as you need it. Senior specialists join for the part of the work that needs them, for exactly as long as it needs them.
who are we?
- Recruitment strategy and EVP
- Culture change and conscious bias
- Midlife talent strategy and workforce longevity
- AI readiness
- Leadership development and progression
- Cross-generational mentoring
- Organisational psychology and organisation design
- Menopause and women's health
- Coaching for 40+ cohorts
- Diagnostics, listening sessions and research
- Strategic communications
HOW MANY WOMEN OVER 40 DID YOU HIRE LAST YEAR? HOW MANY DID YOU PROMOTE? HOW MANY DID YOU LOSE?
If you don't know, or you don't like the answers, let's talk. Get this right and your organisation has a very good story to tell.
Your culture will work better for everyone, your results will show it, and you'll become an employer of choice.
Get in touch and let's have a chat about your midlife talent strategy, where value may currently be getting lost and what your organisation could do differently.
let's talk
