THERE'LL be jokes aplenty at the news that the UK's working population now includes more than a million people aged over 65. Comfy chairs instead of office recliners, boiled sweets instead of bonuses, crosswords rather than angry exchanges… yes, you've heard them all.
Underneath the humour, though, there's a serious issue. The working world we live in is changing. And it isn't just those people who thought that they were on the verge of Saga Holidays who are affected.
If you speak to the likes of Domestic & General, who have a call centre in Talbot Street in Nottingham, then employing people past retirement age is old news, if you'll excuse the crashingly obvious pun.
Many of their customers (people ringing up about the warranty on their washing machine, for example) may not be spring chickens themselves, so the idea of talking to someone who sees the world through the same prescription specs that they do is a pretty sound idea when you think about it.
The serious issue is what's happening at the other end of the employment scale. It's here that the UK economy has a dirty little secret about youth unemployment.
Quite rightly, politicians have made a huge fuss about the scale of youth unemployment in the wake of recession (and I say "wake" because it now looks like it ended ages ago, in case you hadn't noticed). It simply isn't good enough for a big, modern economy to have more than a million young people waiting to jump on the working ladder and start a productive life. The longer they wait, the harder it is to make that jump.
So why has the Government allowed this to happen? Two answers to that: one is that there's only so much a government can do unless it decides to create a load of jobs itself. The other is that the youth unemployment problem started well before recession.
If you go on to the website run by the Office for National Statistics (only recommended if you have days to spare and hair left to pull out), you'll eventually find a spreadsheet which shows what has happened to youth unemployment since the last recession in the early 1990s.
Back then, youth unemployment peaked at 900,000 in 1992. It then began a long downward path, bottoming out in 2001 at 500,000.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we've seen it shoot up significantly again since 2008, breaking through the million barrier.
But here's the UK's dirty little secret: unemployment among 16-24 year olds had started increasing steadily as long ago as 2004. You read that right: youth joblessness was rising even during the boom.
Lots of clever people have tried to get to the bottom of this. Academics at the London School of Economics did an in-depth study two years ago which shows that the young are always hardest hit when unemployment rises.
One reason is that businesses always try to hang on to experienced staff. They've got better skills, are more likely to be able to soak up extra work if a business downsizes… and it's more expensive to make them redundant. So, when the economic chips are down, the odds are instantly stacked against the young, especially those with a poor education.
As bad as this problem is, it could be even worse if it weren't for the numbers who stay in education.
While today's youth unemployment figures sound frighteningly high, and are unquestionably a cause for concern, the unemployment rate (the proportion of young people out of work) is pretty similar to that of past recessions. The problem is that youth unemployment in the UK was higher than it should have been even before recession struck.
One of the real paradoxes about our economy is the gulf between all the talk of rising educational attainment and the regular complaints from employer organisations (Notts Chamber of Commerce among them) that young people turning up for job interviews lack not only basic language and numeracy skills, but have little idea of the basic commitment needed to hold down a job.
Numerous surveys have pointed to kids from poor backgrounds continuing to do badly, despite all the changes we've had to the education system.
But it isn't just them.
At the weekend, I was chatting to a university lecturer friend who lamented the fact that students brought up on a diet of bite-sized GCSE coursework targets struggled with the intellectual stamina needed for a three-year degree. Worse, even though they were among the elite who'd made it into higher education, they too lacked basic language skills.
In some ways it's good that people in the autumn of their lives are still keeping busy and still doing their bit for UK plc. But what's happening at the other end of the scale is disturbing.
Most disturbing of all, it's been going on under our noses for nearly a decade.
