Retirement Speeches Editing and Proofreading Services

The retirement speech runs through thirty-one years in job titles: joined as a graduate trainee, promoted to supervisor, promoted again, became head of department, saw the company through a merger, is retiring now. Colleagues who have worked alongside this person for a decade are hearing a CV read aloud. The one thing everybody in the room actually remembers her for — that she kept a spare pair of shoes in her desk for anyone whose heels broke before a client meeting — never comes up.

We edit what people write for a retirement — retirement speeches given by the retiree, tributes given by a colleague or manager, leaving cards and collected messages, toasts at a retirement lunch or send-off, the retiree's own reply to a tribute, speeches for retirement after a long single-employer career as well as a varied one, and the shorter remarks given at an informal office leaving do. Our editors work on the speech that has to sum up a working life without turning it into an appraisal.

The specific working detail is what makes a retirement speech land, and its failure is a chronology of job titles that could belong to any sufficiently long career at the company. Head of department for eleven years describes a role, not a person. We work through these so the speech is built around a small number of concrete habits, moments or running jokes rather than a promotion history, since the shoes in the desk drawer are what the department will actually miss and the job title on the leaving card is not; so colleagues are named specifically with what they are being thanked or remembered for, given that a generic thank you to the team flattens years of particular working relationships into one sentence; so difficulties are allowed a mention — a merger that was genuinely hard, a year the department nearly didn't survive — because a speech that presents thirty years as uniformly triumphant is heard as a performance by everyone who lived through the difficult parts; so the retiree's own speech, if they are giving one, is allowed to include what they will not miss as well as what they will, since unmixed gratitude toward a workplace nobody experiences as perfect reads as insincere; so the future is mentioned honestly rather than with forced enthusiasm about golf or gardening the retiree may not actually feel yet; and so the speech is timed short, because a retirement audience standing with a drink in hand can sustain warmth for about five minutes and not much longer. Speeches written this way are the ones people quote back at the retiree years later.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including workplace history, colleagues and anything you would rather handle carefully. We are editors rather than career counsellors or workplace mediators, and we offer no view on your career or your workplace. What we can do is help the speech remember what people will actually remember.