Within the past two years two 50+ women I know completed graduate degrees and got news jobs relating to their degrees, one as a professor and one as a medical librarian. These women live in different parts of the country and have never met, so this isn’t a localized phenomenon.
Oh yes! If you are disregarding employment opportunities because you do not seem to meet all of the requirements listed, then you are short changing yourself.
The job requirements, even the “must have” items are essentially a shopping list for the perfect candidate. It is not expected that every candidate will meet all the ‘requirements’.
Earlier this year, after 30 years in manufacturing management and more than a year of being unemployed, I found a job in a completely unrelated field, essentially a teaching/training job.
As it turns out, experience managing people IS experience teaching. The concepts of instructing people to get things done are quite similar. And it turns out I am quite good at it and well regarded.
And I changed entire careers, at 54 years of age.
While all the warm and fuzzy stories of people over 40 getting new jobs and careers is encouraging, it is also true that right now, and for the past 2 years or so, those over 40 ARE at a disadvantage in SOME categories.
Is it possible to get meaningful work over 40? Sure - but being over 40 is almost never an advantage.
Come teach English in Korea. You won’t be the oldest. The money kind of sucks, though.
I can make money that sucks without flying halfway around the world.
I’m working in a great position that I was hired for back in August and I’m over cough cough.
You forgot “fluency in a programming language last used by Ada Lovelace to support legacy systems.”
I think that mental image plays a huge role in who gets a position: it amuses me, at my school, how often we replace a successful teacher with someone that looks like their predecessor. So when a 40 year old new college grad is competing with 23 year old new college grads, their disadvantages are not logical: hiring managers aren’t making rational choices about expected income or length of time in the workforce (after all, a 40 year old has over two decades of career ahead of them) or impact on insurance premiums. It’s just a gut-level image of the type of person you are hiring.
In the same way, someone who stays looking young can have a bitch of a time getting jobs where the mental image is of someone older and more established.
The trick then, I suppose, is to find someway to make you image match what they are expecting–you can’t change your age, but I would think that in some cases, at least, it’s possible to work towards the type they expect in some ways, or at least present an alternate image that makes sense to them. People really do think in narratives, and finding the way to fit into their story of how things ought to go has always proven successful to me.
It seems like 40 is too low of a cut-off.
I would argue that yes, there are some 50 or 55 year olds who may find it difficult to get a “real” job. My company hired a 57 year old temp, and let him go 2 months later because he didn’t work out as planned. Then again, he found another job in his desired field almost immediately.
But 40? Hell, a 40 year old could be someone with 15 years experience AND another 25-30 years of work ahead of them. That’s hardly old, and companies would be screwing themselves if they didn’t consider hiring someone of that age.
And yet… there are companies that do just that.
They must not need a workforce with expertise, then. Which is understandable, if all you need people to do is press the green button, why hire someone with 15 years experience pressing the red button? But I can tell you as a research chemist that if my company was able to find a well-qualified 40 year old who had experience in our field, we would snap that person up, but unfortunately that type of person is extremely difficult to find (with good reason).
My dad has had four jobs since he was 40, with the last two being past 50. His most recent one he got at…57-ish (he’s 62 now.)
I’ve been working in technology for almost 15 years and I have never seen this. What I have seen is that being able to program in a specific technology is less important than being someone who can learn quickly, think creatively and work with a team (for 100 hour a week). As you alluded to, technology changes so rapidly that there is little need for someone with ten years experience since such a person rarely exists in whatever the latest technology happens to be. There is little to no premium that comes with longevity. That’s why firms like Accenture, EDS, CSC and the Big-4 accounting firms are content to grind through dozens of 24 year old analysts each year.
If you want to have a career with any longevity in IT, you have to move beyond mere development into management, sales or consulting services. Management experience, industry experience, and professional connctions grow and increase in value over time. Writing modules of code defined by business analysis does not.
A lot of it is going to depend on what field you’re talking about. Any business that’s oriented toward consumers is going to gravitate toward young people, because the typical consumer is young. OTOH, being a lawyer or financial advisor with a little gray hair is generally considered a good thing.
I had one boss who believed that anyone with more than 10 years experience should be out on the street, working contacts and bringing in business rather than in the office working. Being 50 was fine as long as you were selling. But if you were 35 and not selling, you were out.
Really? Its almost a joke in the circles I’m in that the requirements are written so that no one could qualify. I’ve seen plenty of ads that want 3 years experience with Microsoft Server 2008 - in 2009.
What managers want is someone who is driven to learn fast and pick up new things. Someone even, with a little business sense who can do some business analyst type work, or project management if needed.
What HR writes an advertisement for is a wish list of technologies. Very often the ad is written by someone who didn’t understand and translates the hiring managers job description into an ad - then runs it by the overworked IT manager who looks at it in his email, doesn’t read it and says “just print it and set up some interviews - I’m dying here!”
The other version of “God on 25K a year” is when someone in a non-tech industry is looking for a tech person and just doesn’t understand what tech people cost or what the time requirements are: they want a “college kid” who can also build and maintain an on-line store front, build and protect a customer database, keep all the office machines running, be available to trouble shoot an IT issues that come up for anyone, automate payroll, digitize fifteen years of records, and to do all this in between waiting on customers. I think this may be less common these days, but in the late 90s there were an awful lot of small businesses who wanted to get in on this internet thing but didn’t really grok that it could both cost and make real money.
No, I’ve seen plenty of those ads. But I’ve just never seen where someone goes line by line to review a persons technical qualifications or refuses to hire someone because they have experience with SQL Server 2008 instead of SQL Server 2008R2.
Quite frankly I’m suspicious of resumes where the person is an expert in 50 different technologies. I would expect to see that they worked on a core set of languages or platforms and maybe dabbled or troubleshot some smaller projects on the side. Like when I started out in the 90s, I mostly worked in Powerbuilder and VB/VBA front ends and Oracle or Access back ends. Later I started dabling in Java and HTML/ASP/.net a bit and Oracle became mostly SQL Server but by then I had graduated B-school and taken on more of a project manager / consultant role. Although I still use SQL Server and Access heavily for data crunching.
I’m 62 and I just landed a job paying upwards of 100k a year.
I am 43 and was out of work (raising kids) for 12 years. I just got a great job!
What type of recruits were they? Am looking at work in Aus - am currently located in South Africa