There are some older workers - probably a lot - who simply don't have the skills or the wherewithal to do a certain kind of job. There, it's up to the worker to go out and bring themselves up to speed and do it in an aggressive way, do it as quickly as possible.
Nick CorcodilosI think that the big age problem in the job market today is really on the part of employers and that they don't seem to be calculating the cost of age discrimination to them when they practice it.
Nick CorcodilosCompanies are missing out on phenomenal skills and capabilities of experienced older job hunters: wealth of knowledge, expertise, seasoning, maturity. Companies need to be reminded of that.
Nick CorcodilosOn a strategic level, employers really are behaving stupidly. Look at how they do recruiting: this automated process under which they will publish a job description chock full of so-called "key words", and then have software algorithms that attempt to match applicants to the resumes against those key words. So where in the key word collection do we capture institutional knowledge? No one advertises for that. Of course they don't.
Nick CorcodilosRemember, the word "discrimination" isn't always pejorative. When an employer discriminates because an older worker lacks certain kinds of skills that are important in the market today, then it's almost a legitimate form of discrimination because the employer is just trying to figure out who can actually get the job done.
Nick Corcodilos