Employers Can Smell Fifty ~ Steve Martin in Bowfinger

What would happen to you if rolled your eyes at a work colleague who is a person of color or LGBT orientation?  You’d be marched into HR for a session in sensitivity training and you might even be fired.  But it’s perfectly acceptable to dismiss older workers that way. Ageism is the last acceptable form of workplace discrimination. According to PwC, while 64% of companies have a formal diversity and inclusivity strategy, only 8% of those include age as a criteria.  While technically illegal, companies use code words with recruiters like “rising in their career” to signal that they are looking for someone young.

            The irony is that “old” is the one demographic of which we will ALL become members.  We won’t all gradually change our ethnicity, race or gender.  But we will all grow old, whether that’s defined as 40 or 50 or 60. And if you wanted to launch your own venture after you age out of your industry, good luck with fundraising. In 2011, Sun Microsystems co-founder and VC Vinod Khosla told a conference that “People under 35 are the people who make change happen. People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” Khosla said he based this statement on his belief that old entrepreneurs can’t innovate because they keep “falling back on old habits”.

P.S. Khosla is 64 years old. Payback is a real bitch.

The Silver Tsunami

Silver Tsunami is a metaphor used to describe population aging.  We’re familiar with the problems of shrinking population in places like Japan and Italy. But the Silver Tsunami we’re facing in the US is somewhat different. The Department of Labor estimates the number of white collar professionals over the age of 50 in the US to be 25 million people. But look around your “open-space” office right now. How many people working there are over 50? Where are all the grey-hairs? Were they caught up in the last round of layoffs or were they never hired at your “unicorn” company in the first place? Mark Zuckerberg was famously quoted as saying “young people are just smarter.”

Who is the presidential candidate that is going to take a stand against institutional ageism in the workplace that results in 13% of the adult US population being under-employed? There is an enormous talent pool out there. According to a PWC study, 64% of CEOs have a plan for diversity. Only 6-8% of those plans include age as a criteria. States are starting to implement quotas for the number of women on corporate boards. What about a quotas for intergenerational workplaces?

Everybody Needs a Side Hustle

Great Article in NYTImes

Because you never know when the situation may change with your day job, you need a side hustle. The side hustle is a second source of income to tide you over in lean times or build up savings during flush periods. Your side hustle is an outlet for your creative energy and can also be a way to build your network.

On the way to O'Hare airport, recently, my Uber driver informed me that his day job was as an environmental engineer. He lived in the western suburbs and his office was right next to O'Hare so he tried to pick up a fare every morning on his way to work. Brilliant!

RESILIENCE: THE KEY TO HAVING A PORTFOLIO CAREER

re·sil·ient /rəˈzilyənt/

 ABLE TO WITHSTAND OR RECOVER QUICKLY FROM DIFFICULT CONDITIONS.

 SIMILAR: STRONG, TOUGH, HARDY, QUICK TO RECOVER, QUICK TO BOUNCE BACK

If it feels like the pace of change in the nature of work is accelerating, you’re not alone.  Studies show that 56% of older workers are pushed into “retirement” and find that any new position they find comes with a cut in pay. Looking back, they may have realized that their career peak coincided with a peak in their industry. Sometimes the only way to move forward is to move sideways.

In the old model, more years of experience equaled more money.  Today, your skill set maxes out in value at some point.

When it comes to dealing with career surprises, I’ve found that there are two kinds of people:  resilient people and the other kind.  When I talk to resilient people about their career path, they say things like “I’ve been really lucky” or “I shed my skin and reinvented myself”.  The other kind (#OKBoomer) don’t know how to adapt. They keep thinking that their next job should look just like their last job.

For example, I met two people at a holiday party last week: let’s call them Pete and Joe.  Pete and Joe worked together at a med-tech firm for over 25 years. When their company merged with another firm, they were shocked to find themselves jettisoned by the new management team.

Pete was fortunate enough to get a nice buyout so he decided to “retire.”  You might think that this was a happy ending, but actually Pete is miserable. He is still anchored in his old identity and rehashing how he got screwed by his boss two years ago. 

While Joe was able to negotiate a 3-year transition period, by year two he found himself with very little to do. So he started a side-hustle, consulting with a biotech start-up in Boston. He was able to create value from his decades of industry experience.

In my new book, I’ll be discussing strategies for building resilience into your career.

 #resilience #sidehustle #reinventingwork #okboomer