The real problem causing discrimination against older workers

From the time we leave school until we are somewhere in our 40s, we have what is called “a career”. We progress up through the ranks in our chosen occupation until we get as far as we can go. We each achieve at a different level based on our ability and interest levels, but we all progress or imagine we can progress to one degree or another.

The problem

Then a curious phenomenon starts to become apparent. Up to a certain point, we are younger than our bosses, or at least, visibly less skilled than our bosses, so our position on the workplace hierarchy makes sense. But a point comes when we are older than our bosses, and at least as skilled as they are at the job we are doing. We find ourselves reporting to someone with the same or with less skills and experience than we have for completing the task we are performing. We may be better writers, or better graphic designers, or better welders, or better dog groomers, or better doctors, than the person supervising us. This is where the problem of mature age workplace discrimination starts.

Hey, you ask, how can you claim to know your job better than your bosses do, if they have had the promotions and you have not? The answer to that is simple. There are two high-level skills that a person needs to progress up a workplace hierarchy. The first is the obvious one, the level of expertise in your job. The second skill is where it all gets tricky. This second and potentially even more important skill when it comes to your place in a workplace hierarchy is that of managing the politics of your workplace. Those who make their way up the hierarchy do so because they prioritise managing the politics at least as highly and often more highly than they prioritise their actual performance at the job they are doing.

So back to the point, apart from the few who manage workplace politics very well and make it through the glass ceiling into senior management, the rest of us reach an age when we know more about, and are better at, our actual jobs than our bosses are.

Now some bosses are exceptionally talented and know how to manage workers to take maximum advantage of their skills, in full awareness that they possess the political skill and their “reports” possess the work skill. These relationships become healthy partnerships to achieve a common goal.

But it takes a very strong self-esteem for a manager to do this, and many managers just do not have this particular personal attribute. They require that they are not only better at the politics but better at the job than their “inferiors”, and so now require talented people to work at less than their best, at some level lower than their direct manager, so that they do not offend that person or “show them up”.

This is when the rot sets in. Talented people are talented people, and they cannot keep up the act of being less talented than they are for long. Manipulating bosses is not one of their skills. After all, if they were good at politics, they would have kept climbing up through the management hierarchy themselves. From this point onwards, career decline sets in for these skilled and talented people.

Different personalities handle this in different ways. Some become passive aggressive and sit in the corner plotting revenge. They allow their workplace performance to fall to some level below that of their managers, then sit quietly in a corner and seethe.

Some become aggressive and try to get their bosses to hear them out and treat them with the respect they believe they deserve. They start to go purple in the face and if they are lucky, recover from their heart attacks to live comfortably on workers compensation until it runs out, then on to disability pension. A very few know they are on a fast track to nowhere, quit and try to do something different. Of this group, some succeed and some fail.

The upshot is that many talented people find their careers in free-fall until they eventually hit the unemployment or disability pension lines.

This pattern has existed since I was 40, which is about the age at which I started to become aware that I was not, personally, making it up the hierarchy beyond a pretty unimpressive middle management level. I started to read populist books about career success to find out why. I am now 63 and nothing has improved. In fact, the whole situation may well have deteriorated. It is hard to know. Any single individual will experience the problem getting worse as they age and the number of years between the ages of staff and management increase. I am one of the lucky ones who can still get some work because my skills are very niche, but for many a younger, tamer model easily replaces them.

The solution

There are hundreds of reports written by well-meaning groups and individuals on the nature of discrimination against mature age workers. We know, beyond a doubt, that it is very real and very serious, but no one seems to have any idea how to reverse it. Hundreds of reports and several decades later nothing has changed. Some focus on making it illegal to discriminate against us, but surely the experience of feminism has shown us that you cannot force employers to employ someone they don’t want? Others focus on how, as a culture, we can change perceptions so that employers want to employ mature age workers.

I say that neither approach can or will succeed because they have missed one critical point… That no 30 something wants to manage their mother or, heaven help us, their grandmother, in the workplace, particularly if that mother or grandmother knows more than they do. It is simply not going to happen.

So let’s forget the idea of either forcing or encouraging companies to employ us. That is not healthy for them, and is deadly for us. Having been the token woman in a men’s workplace for my working life, I know the cost of being the “token”. I don’t want to swap the role token woman for the role of token old woman! Let’s do something completely different. Let’s find a new pathway.

The second career

That new pathway is the idea of a second career. Now obviously, there is no point moving into a second career where the same problems manifest themselves. We have to do something differently to get different results.

We have two options. We can find mature age friendly industries or employers, and let’s face it. There are probably not enough of them to go around – yet.

This leaves self-employment as the other option. As each individual hits their maximum achievement level on a workplace hierarchy, and then finds their first career in free-fall, they can be encouraged to step sideways into their own small business, using their high-level skills and talents to maximum advantage, and compensating for their weaknesses.

The problem with this as that all know that the vast majority of new start-up businesses go bust, so how can this be the answer?

This is where “the system” steps in. We need to formalise the concept of the” second career” in our culture, and make sure that mature age individuals have as much support entering their second careers as school leavers get entering their first career.

However, that support must be different. We need a structure where adequate financial and business support is provided to individuals seeking to take this sideways step into self-employment. There is some infrastructure there, but it is woefully inadequate. There are business incubators, and there is the extremely limited NEIS scheme, but these have serious design shortfalls and simply do not suit the needs of most mature age workers.

We need vastly more types and styles of business support for much longer durations than the current schemes, so that highly talented business people can correctly mentor all individuals who step sideways into their own businesses. Essentially, we need a second education system that is able to recognise the different needs and learning styles of mature age skilled workers and provide appropriate skills acquisition and mentoring processes.

The truly clever country

In recognition of the fact that workers are going to stay in the workforce for many years beyond the official retirement age, could we match the budget for training students into their first career, with a similar budget for retraining mature age skilled workers into their second career?

True, this is a high cost operation. But ultimately it will cost much less than the appalling waste of talent and work ethic of the skilled mature age underemployed. How many people find themselves working at levels vastly below their actual skill level for increasing periods of time, over a span of up to 25 years or more until they can afford to retire?

Currently we are wasting the productive effort of potentially half of our workforce. Let’s do something to reverse that and become the truly clever country!

I will be starting two hubs to help some of these issues, one in Bendigo, Victoria, and one on-line hub. If you have 15 hours per week to spare and skills going begging, and would like to be part of the inaugural on-line hub and working party, please contact me, Christine Kent at [email protected].

Where do you think the discrimination problem comes from? Tell us in the comments below!