LinkedIn is normally a placid oasis in the seething broth of social media chatter. But it lit up the other week when one of its users posted a chart showing the different stages of working life that had appeared in the career advice section of the Indeed.com job-listing site.
The chart claimed that, from the age of 21 to 25 you were in the “exploration” stage. By 45 to 55 you were “late career”. And once you reached the 55 to 65 mark you had hit “decline”.
Readers were predictably gobsmacked.
“Just appalling”, “shocking” and “WTF!!!” they wrote, as Indeed scrambled to take down the item and insist it should never have been published or even written.
“We deeply apologise for content that wrongly negated the important role workers play at every stage of their career,” the job site told me last week. “Older workers in particular are vital and highly valued leaders, mentors and contributors to the workplace.”
This, alas, is rubbish. Ageism is rife in the workplace, assuming older employees can hang on to a job at all.
Experts say the over-50s are twice as likely to struggle to find a new job if they are made redundant. Those over 65 are the second most likely group to be on a zero-hours contract after 16- to 24-year-olds. This is frustrating considering that, despite the stereotypes, baby boomers are by no means uniformly loaded. People in England aged 60-64 have the highest poverty rates among adults of any age, says the UK’s Centre for Better Ageing. The problem shows no sign of easing given the demographic tsunami of ageing boomers.
Also, if you ask ChatGPT “what are the main stages you go through in a career?” it will spit out a very similar answer to the one in the Indeed chart, so don’t be surprised if some clueless “content producer” uses it somewhere again.
This is one reason I have been cheered by the number of octogenarians I’ve come across recently who are not only working but insist they have no plans to retire.
“I do it because I like it,” the 85-year-old financial economist Eugene Fama told one of my colleagues who asked him why he kept at it when they met in Fama’s University of Chicago office.
Actor Sir Ian McKellen is also 85 and equally unpersuaded about the merits of chucking it in. “I shall just keep at it as long as the legs and the lungs and the mind keep working,” he told an interviewer a few weeks ago.
Others are lining up to join them. “While I love it I’ll keep doing it, definitely,” the 66-year-old co-founder of the Zoe personalised nutrition programme Prof Tim Spector recently told a writer who had asked if he would keep working another 20 years.
These people are lucky. They are working because they enjoy it. And why not? As the 82-year-old chair of the Rosetrees health research charity, Richard Ross, told me last week, working keeps your brain active, allows you to stay in touch with interesting people and stops you being dull. “I don’t think I would still be alive if I had retired at 65,” he said.
But other older employees stick at work for the same reason that people of all ages do: they need the money. Either way it’s best to get used to them because their presence has been steadily growing. In 2023 there were 527,600 people aged 65 and over working full time in the UK. That is 4.3 per cent of all people in that age group, which is up from 2.7 per cent in 2010.
And if you are in your 20s and reading this thinking you are never going to have a career if all these ageing job-hoggers hang around into their 80s fear not. Only 13,700 people aged 80 or older were estimated to be in full-time work in the UK last year. That is a piffling 0.06 per cent of all full-time workers – even if it is up from the 0.04 per cent a decade earlier.
The more important point is this: any older worker who saw a chart describing a 55-year-old as being in decline would have stepped in and saved their bosses from the idiocy of publishing it. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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