I hear all the time about how it’s really hard for young people to get jobs these days - lots of competition and lack of experience leading to either unpaid internships, low level dead end jobs, or exploitative hours for little reward.
But I also hear it about older people too - once you hit 40, you become much more expensive to hire and become almost unemployable, that companies would rather hire a bunch of young people to inflict those exploitative hours, and that you might as well become a Wal-Mart greeter because that’s what your MBA will get you once you’re 50.
And in between, there are the perils of layoffs, of firings, of plain bad luck. It strikes me that this doesn’t leave a lot of margin for error, especially with job security much lower in the past few decades than in the past.
So what margin of error does the average worker, blue or white collar, have in his or her career? Are we going to see a huge tidal wave of poor older people in a few decades, or even soon? Are those who spent more than X years without a steady job (and thus unable to keep up with retirement earning plans), or at age Y without one, doomed to poverty and burger flipping despite their PhD? Do you need find a job you’ll be at for life (or even 15+ years) or face a bleak future? Or is there more hope than the anecdotal evidence of those who weren’t so lucky may make you think?