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Better healthcare and a change in people's attitude to retirement means older workers will increasingly be relied upon to keep the country going. In fact, Department of Labour figures show that by 2020 the number of people available for work will start to drop due to lower birth rates.
While this trend may leave the door wide open for older people who want to continue working beyond the typical retirement age of 65 - employers will have to be a little more open-minded when it comes to recruitment.
"It's getting easier," says Graham Stairmand, national president of Grey Power, a lobby group promoting the welfare and well-being of the over-50s.
"But employers will have to be more flexible when it comes to employing older people.
"Older people often only want to work part time, perhaps starting work later in the day and they shouldn't always be expected to be as fast or as agile as their younger colleagues."
But what they may lack in physical fitness, they make up for in experience, knowledge of their company and industry and can be a strong guiding hand to new people to the industry.
Stairmand says having a work-life balance is important to older workers and that employers need to bear that in mind when recruiting because if official figures are correct it is not going to get any easier for recruiters.
Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunities commissioner, Dr Judy McGregor, predicted that New Zealand would need about 100,000 more people at work in the next 20 years just to stand still and yet older people were often the last to be considered for jobs or suffer "covert discrimination".
"We believe that businesses need to be thinking about their age profile and about retaining their mature staff," she said. "Baby boomers approaching retirement should also be considering whether they want to continue in paid work and what might make them stay.
"Ironically, New Zealand will need more people aged from 55 onwards to stay in paid work at a time when retirement and early retirement is popular."
Stairmand says he's glad there is no longer a compulsory retirement age and welcomes the trend of older workers being able to keep on working. But concedes they may need a bit more support from their managers to younger staff.
"These older workers need a little bit of understanding and to be given some latitude by employers so they can, say, come in three mornings a week - they need flexible working hours.
"Before the labour market became as tight as it is now, managers thought that young was beautiful and younger workers can do everything. So a lot of companies lost a lot of experience and knowledge as they let their older, more experienced workers go.
"Employers have slowly but surely realised that that wasn't a good idea. Older workers have the experience of knowing how to do jobs or handle things that many young people have never seen before and that experience can be invaluable to a good employer."
Older workers may not be surprised to learn that New Zealand has one of the highest workforce participation rates in the OECD for the 50-64 year age group. Workers aged 55 make up one in six of the total work force.
And, say government statistics, in the past year the number of older people employed has grown by 5.9 per cent, which exceeds the growth in total employment of 1.9 per cent over the same period. More older men are now working with their participation rate standing at 49.3 per cent compared with 33 per cent for women.
Lesley Haines, the Department of Labour's group manager for workforce policy, says there's growing recognition by business that older workers are an experienced and valuable pool of labour that will help fill the skills' gap.
And many people welcome the chance to earn extra money to top up State benefits and pension so they can enjoy their free time even more.
A report called 45 plus: Choices in the Labour Market provides an insight into drivers and barriers to paid work for people over 45.
"The research shows that many people in this age group still face barriers to taking up paid work. Some of the people have responsibility for young children or grandchildren, or for relatives," Haines says.
Combining these responsibilities with paid work can be challenging.
"Other barriers faced by this age group included low or outdated skills, age discrimination, experienced and perceived, and not knowing where to go for information about work."
But Stairmand says things are moving in the right directions for older job hunters. He says employers are increasingly starting to recognise that older workers can learn and retrain for different jobs.
"Just because people are older it doesn't mean that the lift doesn't go to the top anymore," he says. "There is not the same level of reluctance as there used to be to employing the older worker."
And he says older people are as tech-savvy as their grandchildren when it comes to computers and the internet.
"The greatest uptake of the internet is by people aged over 65. A lot of elderly people do use computers."
In Stairmand's experience, most people want to work and say they enjoy the company their workmates give them as well as their jobs.
The results of an online work and age survey by the Equal Opportunities Trust to explore what people want from work as they get older, and what workplace conditions would encourage them to stay in paid work, showed that older people felt they were missing out on training, promotion and recruitment.
The trust's CEO, Dr Philippa Reed, says: "They also felt their ideas and skills were not valued. The results also showed that older workers were looking for flexibility in work practices that did not just mean working fewer hours each week. But also the flexibility to work fewer weeks a month or [fewer] months a year."
More than 6480 people took part in the online survey that also showed that 80 per cent of working people wanted flexibility in their retirement; 85 per cent of retired people hadn't had a flexible or part-time job before retirement; and 90 per cent of workers said either their employer was doing nothing (to transition them into retirement) or didn't know what their employer was doing.
The report also showed that a third of the respondents had experienced age discrimination at work.
People aged over 45 were only slightly more likely to report discrimination than those under 45.
Dr Reed says age discrimination is mainly experienced in general attitudes, promotion opportunities, recruitment and salary level.
And that older people were more likely than younger workers to report discrimination in training.
And for those who can't get work, Stairmand says many are starting up their own businesses.
"In the main, older workers are just as good a tradesman or professional as younger people," he says.
"Employers should not be worried about employing them," he says.
