As I network heavily, a common topic of conversation that comes up is how “older” workers feel that they are being discriminated against in this market due to their age. I will not argue this point, but there are three points I would like to bring light to:
- It is not your age that turns off companies – it is the staleness of your skills. If you are a marketing/PR person and have not mastered social media, a business analyst stuck in Waterfall, a developer stuck in Perl and COBOL, etc., than your age has nothing to do with it. No one is entitled to a job anymore. Bring value to the table! Gray hair and general experience is only 50% of the equation. You actually have an advantage – your experience allows you to pick up skills faster, because you already know many common elements. Do it!
- Startups LOVE experienced people. Stop wasting your time in big corporations. All the youth in startups need a healthy dose of “gray hairs” for balance. If you have up-to-date skills and a positive attitude – you are darn irresistible.
- Entitlement days are over, stop talking about the past. What keeps some people from talking to you is negativity. Times are hard for everyone. Pensions, guaranteed lifetime employment, and overly-generous benefits are gone due to evolution of the business. Such is life, move on, adapt, and thrive!
Here is a great example from my experience. I worked in a software development company where we had a couple 50+ year young developers who handled projects and code like masters. In a way, their maturity gave them the superior ability to handle the inherent stress of the industry and VIP clients. They were fun too, because the stories from their days at IBM, Digital, Arthur Andersen, etc. were great lunch conversations. They became the highest valued employees in the company, and if there was a hot new technology coming up somewhere, they were the first ones to know about it.
Photo credit: Stephen Hackett
Hi, my name is Apolinaras Sinkevicius, but most call me Apollo. I am the guy who takes care of the day-to-day business and technology of rapidly growing companies. 12 years in managing the "nuts and bolts" of companies and being a steward of corporate cultures makes me a seasoned operations professional and right hand person to founders and CEOs.
There’s a discussion on Linkedin regarding this subject and I thought your input should be added so I’ve posted it to the SalesBlogcast.com discussion group question “Should Age be an Issue when Hiring”.
@techdom
Courtney, I absolutely love your post from A. S. I read every single word of it, and I could not agree more. My favorite line is: “If you have up-to-date skills and a positive attitude – you are darn irresistible.” That is so true, and the BEST! Thank you for that great share! Diane
You missed one big huge negative for experienced people and startups. They rarely are interested in paying fair market value, which is often why they’re full of cheap, young employees.
Chad,
That is not necessarily the case. Two points:
1. Fair market value is in the eyes of the candidate and is often not based on facts. Such is our human nature. One has to think in terms of what value they bring to the company. If you think you are worth $100K, prove to the company beyond any doubt your work will directly generate 5-10X that in profit. You will have no problem getting that money. If you are really worth what you think you are worth, it does not matter the size of the company, you will get paid that. If you are only getting low-balls, maybe that is what you are really worth – update your skills to improve you value.
2. If you really got your stuff together and have that irresistible value to provide, trust me, you will get paid more than what you even can get paid at Fortune 500. I am in operations, people in my field either determine or are part of the team that determines compensation. How do you think we attract best of the best from the big boys? It is definitely not the gaming rooms and X-boxes, many big boys have the toys themselves.
Apolinaras, I love that you take on a couple of tough topics here…age discrimination and diversity. Our team happens to be both mostly female and older than the startup norm. In fact, a potential investor said, “I don’t usually invest in people as old as you.” I told him that he couldn’t view women in startups with the same lens as men….some of us defer starting companies until our children are more independent. But I was talking to a wall. Oh well. In some ways this man was totally gender neutral….he saw family as irrelevant if you wanted to start a company. “You either had it in you or you didn’t” was his contention.
.-= Jules Pieri´s last blog .. =-.
Jules,
Thank you for the kind words.
My father started all his very successful ventures once he “retired”. In a way, I think his success was due to all that experience he amassed during life, he had nothing to prove, and there was no distraction of very young kids. One really has two periods of time in their life to start a company. Either before the kids (and even before one gets “attached”), when it is only the entrepreneur who has to go to homeless shelter, if things go bad. Or after kids are past that very dependent stage. In US we seem to focus very much on that first window.