The Surprising Truth About Older Workers
Here’s one: Their strengths can make them the most valuable people in the office
by Nathaniel Reade, AARP The Magazine, August/September 2013
Until landing a good job in 2012, Mark Simoneau, now 65, was out of work or underemployed for four years. — Dave Lauridsen
"When Mark Simoneau finally landed a job interview last October, he had to borrow a car to get there. His rusty 16-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis needed a new transmission.
You might say Simoneau was rusty, too: He'd been either out of work or underemployed for four years. And he was 64 years old.
Simoneau's age was significant: These days, 50-plus workers like him face brutal odds if they lose their jobs. Forty-four percent of jobless workers 55 or older had been unemployed for over a year in 2012, a Pew study reported. And while older workers have a lower unemployment rate overall, the ones who lose their jobs can find the long hunt for work unbearable.
Half of unemployed workers over 62 drop out of the labor force within nine months, according to an Urban Institute study. Worse: To pay the bills, they tap their Social Security years early, permanently cutting their benefits and imperiling their retirement security.
Myths & Misperceptions
But getting people like Simoneau back to work can mean overcoming age discrimination. In a 2009 report from the Sloan Center on Aging & Work, hiring managers at state agencies listed a litany of stereotypes to explain why they tend to reject older job seekers: They felt these applicants were more likely to be burned-out, resistant to new technologies, absent due to illness, poor at working with younger supervisors and reluctant to travel.
Other studies have shown that employers assume older applicants are less creative, less productive, slower mentally and more expensive to employ than early or mid-career employees.
But Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School of business and coauthor (with former AARP CEO Bill Novelli) of the 2010 book Managing the Older Worker, has looked more closely at these stereotypes, pulling together research from fields like economics, demography and psychology. What he determined: Virtually none of them holds up.
When it comes to actual job performance, Cappelli says, older employees soundly thrash their younger colleagues. "Every aspect of job performance gets better as we age," he declares. "I thought the picture might be more mixed, but it isn't. The juxtaposition between the superior performance of older workers and the discrimination against them in the workplace just really makes no sense."
So how does a guy like Mark Simoneau convince a potential employer to take a serious look?
After graduating from Villanova in 1970, Simoneau settled outside Boston, raised a family, earned an MBA and worked in human resources at manufacturing and construction firms. In 2007 a recruiter enticed him to leave his job and make more money at another company. But he objected to some of the firm's practices, and three months later he decided to part ways — a fateful choice.
That was in 2008, just as the Great Recession hit. At 60, Simoneau began hunting for a job."
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