The Authors
They live the message.
Victoria Tomlinson and Louise Ballard bring lived experience, deep expertise and hard evidence to one of the most urgent conversations of our time.
Author
Victoria Tomlinson
Founder & CEO, Next-Up · TEDx Speaker · BBC Commentator
Victoria Tomlinson has spent her career challenging how work is done and who gets to do it. One of the few women in senior roles early in her career, she built a track record of "firsts", from being the first female graduate trainee in a 20,000-employee engineering business to becoming one of the youngest leaders in EY's London practice, where she led a division of 100 people and drove a major culture change programme.
She went on to found and run an award-winning communications agency while raising a family, later expanding internationally with an office in Dubai. In her 50s and 60s, Victoria reinvented again – becoming a BBC Expert Woman commentator, launching Next-Up to help the 50+ generation rethink their working lives and more recently building a tech platform piloted by a major bank to support longer, more flexible careers.
Today, as CEO of Next-Up, she works with leading professional services firms and corporates to help them unlock the value of experienced talent. Her work has created a global community of firms rethinking partner careers and later-life transitions.
Victoria is an international keynote speaker, TEDx speaker (A Generation of Wasted Talent) and Amazon bestselling author. She is a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University, a Fellow of the RSA, and has held board roles including founding Chair of WILD Digital, University of Leeds Management Advisory Board and on the board of Northern Ballet. She also supports employment initiatives for ex-offenders through HMP Askham Grange.
Expiry Date Never brings together the insights from her work with individuals and organisations to challenge how we think about age, work and experience and to show what needs to change.
Co-Author
Louise Ballard
Co-founder, Atheni.ai · FT Working It AI Expert 2025 · Speaker on AI transformation
Louise Ballard started her career teaching business English in Vienna, and talked her way into a new role in an investment bank by teaching the recruitment agent first. She spent thirty years in communications, founding a PR agency working with venture capital firms and Austrian listed businesses on investor communications, which was acquired by Huntsworth plc in 2009. She stepped back for her children and then cancer and then a decision she hadn't entirely planned: to start again.
At 52 she co-founded Atheni.ai, a start-up that combines human coaching with an AI-powered platform that supports every person in an organisation through AI adoption, individually and at scale. She brings to it a career spent watching how humans actually change and a brain wired to connect things others often compartmentalise.
She spends her time in organisations where the tools exist but the work hasn't changed. That gap – between buying AI and actually changing how people do their jobs – is what Atheni was built to close. She works every day with teams moving from curiosity to confidence with AI, because AI literacy doesn't just protect a career, it significantly amplifies it.
She wrote the AI chapters of Expiry Date Never, making the case that experienced professionals don't become less relevant as AI scales – they become more so. One of the FT's Working It AI experts in 2025, she speaks regularly on AI transformation. At 55, she is building her own career with AI. From scratch.
Contributing Author
Dr Sarah Hattam
GP and CEO, Concilio Health
Dr Sarah Hattam contributes Chapter 5, Living Well for Longer: the science of healthspan – bringing clinical expertise and the evidence base on what genuinely keeps people sharp, energetic and capable as they age. Louise Ballard contributes the AI chapters (6 and 8).