The article discusses some aspects of the Russian government's program to retrain or train so-called pre-retirees. It is emphasized that the trend of population ageing is observed almost everywhere, especially in European countries, so the issue of retraining able-bodied age citizens is quite relevant and nontrivial. It is suggested that a similar program of professional knowledge should be developed at the state level for those who have already reached retirement age. The article speaks about the potential of higher education institutions as a basis for the implementation of retraining of working citizens close to retirement age. The best, in our opinion, forms of presentation of material in training courses are considered. The experience of such courses for senior university staff is described. It is proposed on the basis of expert assessments and fuzzy logic methods to develop an expert system for the selection of training courses and the method of training. The conclusion provides some proposals to optimize ways to solve this problem, such as the creation of a federal database that stores information about educational platforms, courses in vocational retraining, and the degree of demand for new occupations in the labor market; pre-electronic testing of applicants taking into account psychosocial factors and others.