Episode Seven - Ageism in the Workplace: The Hidden Bias Affecting All Ages

In this episode, Mary and Katie discuss ageism in the workplace. They share their own backgrounds and experiences before diving into the definition of ageism and its prevalence in the workforce. They explore the challenges faced by older workers, including discrimination, limited job opportunities, and cultural bias. They also discuss the impact of ageism on financial security and mental health. The hosts provide practical advice for employees, such as evaluating professional options, saving and spending wisely, and continuously updating skills. They also suggest strategies for organizations to combat ageism, including integrating age into workforce planning, training recruiters and hiring managers on generational considerations, and tracking age-related metrics in diversity and inclusion programs.

Takeaways

• Ageism is a prevalent issue in the workplace, particularly for older workers who face discrimination and limited job opportunities.
• Cultural bias and the perception of a lack of adaptability are common reasons for ageism in hiring decisions.
• Employees should continuously evaluate their professional options, save and spend wisely, and update their skills to stay competitive in the job market.
• Organizations can combat ageism by integrating age into workforce planning, training recruiters and hiring managers on generational considerations, and tracking age-related metrics in diversity and inclusion programs.

Keywords

ageism, workplace, discrimination, older workers, job opportunities, cultural bias, financial security, mental health, skills, workforce planning, diversity and inclusion

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Backgrounds
• 10:43 Defining Ageism and Its Prevalence
• 31:11 Impact of Ageism and What Employees Can Do
• 33:33 Strategies for Organizations to Combat Ageism

Transcript

Mary (00:04.599)
Welcome to Business Psychos, where we discuss how to navigate the complexity of corporate culture and modern life without becoming a psycho. I'm Mary.

Katie (00:16.558)
And I'm Katie.

Mary (00:20.343)
And we are the business psychos.

Hi, Katie.

Katie (00:26.99)
Hi, Mary.

Mary (00:28.887)
Before we start today, we received some comments from some of our listeners asking us to talk a bit more about our backgrounds and experience. You want to go first?

Katie (00:43.374)
Yeah, definitely. I'll go first. I think this is a very good question and a call out because it helps frame the perspectives that we're coming to the discussion with. So I just had this conversation last week. I had dinner with my Eli Lilly bestie Siobhan from back in the day when I was a pharmaceutical rep.

And she's still in the industry and my career has diverged pretty dramatically from when we known each other. So I went through a bit of this chronology. So when I was thinking about this ahead of our recording, I was thinking, why does this feel like I just said this? Why does this feel so familiar? But so for me, the headline is that for the last close to 20 years in the,

career parts of my life, I've built revenue, AKA sales and customer success teams for early stage tech companies. And three times the companies that I have built teams in and organizations in have gone on to either become publicly listed and or reach billion dollar valuation, which is something I'm proud of. I'm proud to have been part of some really phenomenal groups, but my niche.

is that I tend to build from the ground up, meaning there's no organization or infrastructure in place. And this involves figuring out the value proposition. So how and who we sell to, our processes, our operations, hiring, comp plans, building the leadership org, which also includes ideal individual contributors and which roles make sense for what we're doing.

the management layer and more senior leaders, along with training and development lead generation and scaling and optimization. And my quantum leap from pharmaceutical or the medical space was that I was working as an individual contributor for a medical device company and the wife of the co -founder and CEO of the first tech company I worked at.

Katie (02:58.83)
recommended me to her husband conceivably because of how I was approaching my role. I was doing a lot of analytics. I was doing a lot of figuring out how to optimize. I was working very hard. But so with that said, what I loved about the work that I've done in my career has been the human component. The revenue results have been essential.

But in many ways, secondary to what gives me energy around the work, I've been really lucky in many ways because I've worked with brilliant founders and extraordinary people have led my organizations. So Mary, let me pass the mic back to you.

Mary (03:45.719)
Yeah, the elevator line is I like to build, grow and fix things. I started my career in the digital and operations space. I started off at NYU and then Tiffany and company. And I would say I've spent most of, what is this like 25 going on 30 years in management consulting. First at Oliver Wyman and later at Boston Consulting Group.

I've also held executive roles at large banks where I focused on strategy and change management. I founded M. Schaub Advisory and am grateful to now spend my time supporting senior executives with their transformation work. And as you know, I'm also a, as I said, you also know I'm a freelance writer and I have a few projects that I'm hoping I'll be able to share at some point later this year or early next.

Katie (04:29.742)
Yeah, lots of.

Katie (04:42.51)
Yeah, what an extraordinary career you've had. I mean, just every single name is recognizable and the impact that you've had in those organizations is absolutely incredible. So.

Mary (04:46.519)
same.

Mary (04:56.407)
Well, your stats are equally exciting. And I think what you've talked about before, and we've talked offline about this, is we both have very unique experiences in the workforce and as leaders. And I think that's really important right now because there's so many people who care about these issues. But it has a slightly different flavor if you're in a tech startup or if you're in a 200 ,000 person organization.

And that workforce is changing. So good insights.

Katie (05:29.006)
Yeah, and I think for both of us, we came up from very like unconventional paths into the organizations and the functions that we performed in. And I think that has also maybe informed a lot of the commonality we have in terms of the empathy and the perspective that we have. It's very similar, even though the types of organizations we've been in has been very different.

That's the impression I got.

Mary (05:58.167)
100%. Okay, I wanna shift gears and indulge myself a little bit. And I wanna ask you what's new? What have you seen, heard, read, watched? I have something, I'm really excited.

Katie (06:04.75)
Peace out.

Katie (06:14.478)
Well, so upon your recommendation, I did a deep dive into Netflix and what I found along the way. So once I had completely exhausted your recommendation in very short order, by the way, I chewed through what you'd recommended. I found a show called The Program, which is about these high discipline behavior control schools. They're not really schools.

these organizations and I am so riveted by like coercion and these types of environments where they, you know, absolutely like, I mean, it's sort of like group traumatization, but I actually watched it two times. There's I think three episodes and I, yeah, I was, I was just riveted. It was really, it was called The Program. It's on Netflix. How about you?

Mary (07:03.639)
Oh wow.

Wow.

Okay, I'm putting that on the list. I love, as you know, I have like all of my recommendations on a Trello board when I get them. So I'm talking about what everyone's talking about, which is Baby Reindeer on Netflix. And my wonderful friend and friend of the show, Mario, recommended it. And I'm so grateful that he did. It's so intense, but also unique and really psychologically complex.

and it stars and it was written by Richard Gadd. And I had no idea until I was halfway into it that he's actually playing himself in the show. I knew that it was based on real experiences, but I had no idea that was him. I don't wanna say anything more than that. If you know, you know. If you don't and you like things which pack an emotional punch, check it out. But this to me is like the proverbial like water cooler show that...

you watch it and you just feel like you have to talk to somebody the next day and like what is it that I just experienced? So if anybody has any comments, feel free to put them in our comments. Love to hear about it.

Katie (08:13.87)
Wait, you're not gonna do any spoilers?

Katie (08:19.598)
You're not doing any spoilers?

Mary (08:23.799)
No, I would, oh my God, I hate people who spoil things. And it's just, it's so, all I'll say is he's a struggling comedian. And I have talked about comedians before on the show. I love comedians. And it is, and just when you think you have it under, you know, you completely understand what's going on. It has another twist and turn. It's one of those limited series. It's bingeable, but actually, I don't know if I could binge, you binge that because I couldn't, like I needed a break. I needed some cartoons.

Katie (08:49.454)
Yeah.

Mary (08:53.335)
some cereal before bed after watching that. I was like, I needed like a, you know, a palate cleanser.

Katie (09:01.326)
Yeah, understandably. I chewed through it, but it is, as far as writing is concerned and structuring, it's just, it's really extraordinary. It's an extra...

Mary (09:11.383)
Oh, and character, character development. Oh my God.

Katie (09:15.246)
And also how it's structured in terms of like building the plot that yeah, that was that was pretty That's pretty unusual right now I feel like a lot of writing is does a lot of sort of cheap shots to just kind of keep the plot going but this really continued to build and Yeah, I mean I think that probably yeah, and and I mean I don't think this is too much of a spoiler

Mary (09:29.751)
Yeah.

Mary (09:35.927)
No formula.

Katie (09:42.638)
But for me, I mean, there were some things and since we're not doing spoilers, I'm not going to speak to them. There are certain things that I was like, yeah, I, I found, um, a little bit sort of, I was like, yeah, I don't know how I feel about that, which is, you know, fine. I don't agree with everything, you know, um, yeah, I, yeah, I, I, I, I'm going to cut that and edit. I'm going to cut that and edit actually, but yeah.

Mary (10:06.647)
Not provoking.

Katie (10:11.854)
So anyway, it was highly, highly appreciate the recommendation.

Mary (10:12.695)
So.

Mary (10:17.047)
Well, and thank you for yours. I'll add that to the list. So onto today's topic. This is another, I think, important and timely one. And it's the first show we're doing at our listeners request, which I think is kind of cool. So when we come back, we're going to talk about ageism next on Business Psychos.

Mary (10:42.743)
Okay, we are back talking about ageism today. Like everything we talk about here, this is a complex issue which we aren't gonna fully unpack in 30 minutes. Let's start with the definition of ageism, right? It's prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of someone's age. In 1967, the US Age Discrimination Employment Act was established. It prohibits discrimination in hiring, promotion, discharge, compensation, job training,

as well as harassment and hostile behaviors due to age. Okay, so this is important though. For our discussion today, we're gonna be focusing on discrimination of older workers. And I say this because the US law I just mentioned only covers workers over 40 years old. This means it is currently legal to discriminate against US workers

under 40 due to their age, which I found really, really interesting. And I would love to hear a few points from our under 40 listeners on whether you have seen this or felt it, or if you have any unique perspectives, and maybe we'll do another topic to cover it in the future. So next, the majority of the baby boomer generation are still in the workforce and are generally postponing retirement.

And this is a really big change compared to prior generations. The US Bureau of Labor projects that the number of older folks in the workforce is going to increase over the next decade with adults over 65 comprising almost 9 % of the labor force by 2032. So I don't know, Katie, I'm a very visual person. I'm always like concepts and frameworks and stuff in my head. So.

As I was taking in all these statistics and doing this research, the workforce used to look like a triangle with the oldest workers on the top. And now because the boomer generation isn't retiring, it's actually more like a square, which I think is really interesting. And it helps me kind of like think about the context here. So there are about a million folks over 55 who are unemployed.

Mary (13:10.519)
Most of these are what's called long -term unemployed, which means you've been looking for a job for more than 27 weeks. The AARP, and if you're not familiar with that, that's the American Association of Retired Persons, notes that more than a quarter of those million unemployed have been denied a job due to their age. And even those who have jobs are reporting feeling ageism.

78 % of employed Americans, that's huge, that's like 80%, Katie, almost 80 % of employed Americans between the ages of 40 and 65 are saying that they've seen or experienced ageism. And nearly half of those have felt it in the last three years.

Katie (14:02.094)
Wow. Yeah, it really strikes me as this kind of damned if you do damned if you don't dividing line of 40 years old. And I'm really glad that you pointed out the like the importance of of of age related discrimination earlier in your career, because in the early stage of your career, there's it's really emphasized how you don't have enough experience.

Mary (14:12.567)
Hmm.

Katie (14:29.646)
And then in the later stage of your career, it's emphasized that you just, you really have too much and now whatever experience you have is irrelevant. So, I mean, back to the damned if you do damned if you don't. And so for in the U S the average age to start working is between 20 and 25 years old. And the federal protections against age -based discrimination apply to 40 years and older. So.

This is meaningful to everyone. I mean, regardless of your current age, because if you start working at 25, there's only 15 years of like being like not too old versus the 25 years spent from 40 to 65. And this means half of the traditional career is spent in the protected class status for age. And I mean, it's coming for everyone. And I've observed there tends to be that.

Mary (15:22.103)
It is.

Katie (15:25.582)
kind of like split at the 40 line. And when thinking about this episode, I thought about even like what it means to be qualified, what it means to be qualified, like skills are less valuable than I think for once you have more experience understanding the longer term implications on timeless themes, like the impacts of.

certain shortcuts or seeing signals in the org and knowing what will happen if corrective action isn't taken. I mean, arguably skills age out a bit and knowing how to use new software, understanding cultural trends, you know, if these are things that are like meaningful for the business need to constantly be updated. But, you know, being curious, open to learning, not afraid to look stupid.

I mean, this goes back to our overachievement episode and it benefits people on both sides of this divide. I mean, there can be, what I've seen is a sort of a generational standoff with younger folks feeling unproven and anxious and older folks feeling or fearing being irrelevant. And when those defenses get heightened, these positions become more divisive. You know, I've seen the...

You know, you're too selfish. You know, they're so selfish. I can't believe that they don't get it on one side of the age divide. And then, you know, they're so clueless on the other. I mean, guess who's saying what? I mean, you could actually kind of, it could be either. But you know, part of the wisdom of experience is being able to remember the process of learning and, you know, maintaining a level of empathy to draw people back.

you know, when you're working with younger people is to understand what it's like to go through those phases. But if we are feeling defensive about our relative position, sometimes that, you know, that can be challenging. So, you know, Mary, I'm like thinking about, you mentioned that one million unemployed Americans, like thinking about those one.

Katie (17:36.814)
million unemployed Americans are 55 and older. I mean, they're going to be particularly devastated coming out of the peak earning years, like their 40s and early 50s. And since these folks are staying unemployed longer, it really can impact their financial status as well as self -confidence and mental health, which is a compounding issue. So often qualified and experienced job seekers will be ghosted by recruiters and...

Many either take gig work to supplement their income or are forced to take lower level and lower paying jobs, which can also dramatically undermine self -confidence.

Mary (18:20.087)
Oh, it's so demoralizing. You're a leader, you've reached a certain point in your career and you have a title and a role. And then, you know, like you're starting to evaluate whether you need to do gig work to even make ends meet. And often this is due to just consolidation and like downsizing, right? This isn't, we're not talking about someone who messed up and got laid off. This is one of those, okay, we need to start to cut heads and some of these folks are included.

I have a friend of mine who's a corporate lawyer who was displaced last year and he's been searching for a job since and still inconceivably to me unable to find a role at the same level and salary as the one he was just downsized from. So he told me that he's starting to interview for more junior roles just out of necessity. And while he was interviewing for one of these smaller jobs, the recruiter actually asked him,

why someone with his experience would be interested in the role. It kind of goes to the point you just said, Katie, right? The damned if you do and damned if you don't. And to me, it felt like a really clever, maybe even somewhat manipulative way of masking ageism and turning the tables to use experience against a qualified candidate.

Mary (19:40.279)
So we think about this and why are organizations doing this? Why does ageism exist in the workplace? And my sense is that the main reason is around senior role scarcity. As you've just said, Katie,

Those folks have reached their peak earning years. And if they've been at an organization for a few years, they're kind of compounding their bonus and their salary, right? They're doing pretty well financially. Most organizations have a hierarchy back to our triangle with the most senior highest paying jobs on top. That's how much most workforce models operate. But as I mentioned earlier, the workforce age demographics,

have changed. So it's no longer a triangle. If you think maybe, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, the age and the corporate hierarchy sort of jived. It all lined up. But now, since boomers aren't retiring and folks are working longer, you have that square workforce with the triangle overlay. So the competition for top jobs is greater because more people are staying in the workforce longer.

You and I were joking around last week, Katie, about musical chairs, that analogy. If folks aren't retiring, you have more people playing for fewer chairs. So if you happen to get booted from your organization, you now have lost a key advantage, your network, the people who know you. And it's going to be harder to get into a brand new organization at a senior level because there's a whole bunch of folks like you there that are competing for those jobs. And...

The next issue, which I think ties into my friend's recruiting experience is cultural bias. So this is really, this was a really disturbing note that I found is that some hiring managers and recruiters report feeling uncomfortable hiring older people due to what they call cultural fit. We'll use my little air quotes there. In my mind, this is antiquated thinking and really just a form of prejudice.

Katie (21:48.718)
Mm -hmm.

Mary (21:54.807)
Like I once had an open role in my team and my manager wanted to be part of the interview panel. So it was fine. And we interviewed a wonderful woman who I'm thinking now was probably in her mid fifties. She had a very successful career and had done some independent work. And during that time, her kids, she had an empty nest. Her kids went off to college and then they, they moved out and she decided to apply to my open role.

So she was, I would say if you were looking at her resume to the role, you might say this person seems a little overqualified for her experience. And I didn't ask about her personal situation. She had actually shared it and it made a lot of sense to me. And then my manager suggested we eliminate her from the first round because she was concerned the candidate wouldn't be a fit for the rest of the team whose age skewed younger. I eventually pressed.

for her to be hired and she ended up doing very well and even played a mentorship role to others in the group, which frankly helped me. I was really stunned. I was wondering to myself, like what cultural harm is an older person going to bring to a team? You know, what's the downside? Is she going to annoy people by talking about her middle -aged hobbies? You know, like.

Sorry, Angela, we can't have any of that bird watching talk around here. You're upsetting the kids. That one's me. And then I think the last bias, which might be grounded in some reality is adaptability, including skills development, which you just touched on. So here's a really disturbing statistic. Only 13 % of hiring managers say they would consider hiring someone 55.

Katie (23:26.062)
I'm sorry.

Mary (23:48.855)
or over, even if they were qualified for the job. So that's just like, no, I'm not gonna, can you imagine for any other demographic just being like, I don't care if you're qualified, just based on your age. They report being concerned that the older people won't have, wait for it, a growth mindset. And then, you know, shout out, we just dropped episode four on growth mindset. If you wanna know what this term is code for.

Katie (23:55.854)
Wow.

Mary (24:17.143)
They say they're concerned that these older folks will be comfortable staying up to date with learning new skills. And so Katie, I don't know about you, this could be true and I have seen it on an individual basis. You do come across people regardless of their age who don't wanna learn anything new. But unilaterally excluding candidates due to their age because of a non -substantiated stereotype is just discrimination.

Katie (24:32.91)
That's not true.

Katie (24:47.374)
Yeah, lack of receptivity to learn things knows no demographics like barrier. I think that's a fact. Yeah, every yeah, it crosses all demographics, ages, protected classes. Yeah, I had a similar experience to the one you just described. For so -called culture fit.

Mary (24:51.383)
Yeah, exactly. That's a uniting, a uniting characteristic. It brings us all together.

Katie (25:16.398)
So I create organizational rubrics, which are clearly defined values for every organization that I build out where, so part of my discovery process about what really makes somebody a fit for this is it's like pulling out the things like curiosity, team player, self -awareness, ethical, strong work ethic, communication skills.

organized sense of urgency with a rating scale and a way to assess it. And, you know, and to claim a candidate is not a culture fit, your case needs to be applied to those values. So the similar to your experience, I had a hiring manager tell me a candidate who had done really well in the interviewing process was not a fit for his organization. And, you know,

similar story, it was a young fun group. And my response at the time was, well, if we pass on her due to culture fit, we need to add age to our rubric. If we are not going to hire her. We need to like, like you're literally redefining our standards.

So we need to maintain uniform standards. So we are going to have to add that as a open air assessment for all candidates. So look, so we hired her and she wound up being a tremendous addition to the team. I think similar to your case, probably mid fifties. And if memory serves, she was really fun and wound up being a cultural touchstone for the group. And actually like,

I think there's the mentorship aspect, but I remember this particular candidate being particularly fun, actually out -funning people. Another thing that's like, hey, the age somebody is going to be is it's an easy out to make these large -scale assessments about whether...

Mary (27:13.495)
Mm -hmm.

Katie (27:38.35)
that it kind of means anything relative to the job. But the social and economic impacts on older, more vulnerable Americans, I mean, this, I take great pause before saying this because it is so astonishing that nearly half of Americans, 46 % of Americans do not have at least three months of savings on hand. And the loss of health benefits, pension contributions,

from employers and social security contribution. It is going to be devastating and contribute like and contributing to these people not taking care of themselves. And this includes preventative treatments like the US spends more on health care and has worse outcomes than comparable countries, than comparable countries. For example, like we have the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable, you know, conditions.

And I think this is an example of systemic issues, such as the impact of eliminating along with the privatization of pensions, thank you Milton Friedman and trickle down economics, where there's generational finger pointing and the associated division that comes along with it where all parties are experiencing the downside of something they did not create. Younger generations feeling blocked from access to advancement and economic prosperity.

and older folks expecting to live longer and therefore need more money for retirement. Our mutual friend Sam had started as a kind of little vignette factoid. Our mutual friend Sam had started a financial tech company for older, it was like designed for his mom, for a bank that served the needs of older folks mostly retired.

And one of the things that came out, they did a lot of demographic research and polling, and they found that the baby boomers who are and will probably be the richest generation of Americans possibly ever, yet when they were polled about their financial state, they often talked about feeling poor, which could be from being raised by parents who experienced the Great Depression, who knows. But to get back on track here, folks are being left.

Katie (30:00.11)
to their own devices fend for themselves in an increasingly challenging environment. And there's this knowledge and experience drain that we're seeing in the US workforce.

Mary (30:12.745)
It doesn't feel to me, Katie, without getting too much into the political realm and you and I have both worked in Europe and are aware of sort of different models, but it doesn't really feel like we're setting people up for success, regardless of what generation that you're in. And going back to our episode on growth mindset, it's all up to the employees of whatever age to assess what's going on and figure it out. And there...

I mean, the safety net for Americans, especially older ones, and yes, I have compassion for the younger generation who is absolutely not being set up for success very unfairly, but some of these older Americans are possibly caring for both elderly parents and children. And there is an insufficient safety net. And if the trends we're talking about continue without intervention, we're gonna start to see suffering at scale.

and a lot of negative impacts on individuals, families, communities, and even the US labor market. When we come back, we're going to talk about what people and companies can do to combat ageism.

Katie (31:35.022)
And we're back talking about what employees can do, what we can do. So as always, you should always be evaluating your professional options, including an exit strategy from your current employer, whether it's voluntary or not, look at your emergency savings and have a plan. You know, one of the things I think that has become increasingly common.

but still is worth a shout out is for folks to really, of course you want to do your best by your current employer and you want to absolutely make the most outstanding contribution possible within your human parameters. But ultimately that, where the forcing function of putting people in the position,

where they are fending for themselves to really respond accordingly. And so be continuing to advocate for yourself and be looking for options and thinking really creatively about how to maximize your network, your skills, your training. Another thing is saving and spending.

So deciding on long -term implications of financial commitments, like making hard decisions. Like the first episode, we talked about spending the treadmill and the golden handcuffs. And I think one of the things that winds up kind of creating a sort of a tightening trap is that a lot of very intense financial commitments are entered into.

with first of all, the assumption that earnings will remain the same. And second of all, not the like a full on consideration of what it's going to look like if you are still managing that expense in 20 years. So thinking really carefully about everything that we take on and anything that we spend on as far as kind of the hard road.

Katie (33:49.294)
becomes the easy road, the easy road becomes the hard road. I don't want to be putting all of this responsibility on people, but just an encouragement about thinking about the financial commitments we make and putting more consciousness into them in terms of like our values and what we want for our lives on the long -term sense. So you're constantly evaluating your technical and your functional skills relative to what's hot on the market. Be aware.

that companies undervalue experience by like 5X, meaning they're happy to hire someone with five years experience compared to yours. Update your resume and LinkedIn at least once a year. Remove old jobs and skills. Like for example, do not list Microsoft Office as a skill. Unfortunately, it is preferable. Yeah, like what is it that, the word that people use like.

like has skills in Microsoft Office Suite. Unfortunately, you know, it is preferable to remove how many years experience along with graduation dates, remove all jobs prior to like at least around 2004. It doesn't really mean like, like it doesn't really mean anything anymore. And I think this is something it came up, you know, I told a story about selling Prozac for Eli Lilly in an earlier episode and some.

someone had given me feedback to say, wow, that's a really dated story. And just to remember that for those of us who have longer career histories, like when something was particularly relevant, you know, it's like, if you're like, I sold for Xerox and, you know, like knock the cover off the ball, it's like, that is a meaningful part of your career. And I don't want to like undersell that, but thinking that your resume isn't sort of like your, you know, your sort of autobiography.

that your resume is actually making a case for the value that you can bring to the position at hand. And so part of that is being like, yeah, I can kind of recognize that you have built on those older skills. But having sold Prozac, telling the story about that. And quite frankly, I was like, oh. I just did, because I was totally unaware of that. So look.

Katie (36:13.326)
Many people start to better understand themselves later in life and decide for themselves that they want to leave their job or a career. Statistics show that this is actually a good time to make changes in your career. Rather than be miserable in a corporate job well into middle age, consider taking control and making a jump to align your interests and skills to opportunities where you may be in greater control of your destiny.

Mary (36:38.327)
Oh, that's so inspiring. I think that's a really positive possible silver lining to all of this, which is on this show, we talk about the grind and the game and the hustle. And now we're talking about how the ladder stops at a certain point and you may kind of be kicked out a little bit, sort of up and out of the game. And maybe this is sobering and a little bit depressing.

but maybe there's a silver lining in it, which is, hey, this is your time now. And maybe there's an opportunity to really shift gears and do something that you're going to like, and there'll be less competition for. I've spent a lot of time in my career around workforce management strategy. And it's been well documented that we have significant skills shortages in the world. At the same time, we also have a reduction in many jobs that

we know will become obsolete due to innovation like AI. And I think we are very, very aware that there are profound changes in how each generation is relating to work, whether it be the healthy boundaries that Gen Z demands or boomers and Gen X staying in the workforce longer. I think trying to be positive here in my mind, there's an opportunity for organizations here.

think differently about employees. And I think the first is to make age part of your overall workforce strategy. Skills should be integrated with forecast planning and all recruiting should be done in alignment with those plans. Now I have seen where we have certain very rare skills where skills will be tracked because they're very precious and they're, you know, certainly where

there might be a certain type of technology that people just aren't learning anymore. But before an organization can sunset that technology, you still need those folks around. And so it's very precious and you track, you can track it down to the individual person. Skills -focused hiring may reduce the likelihood of prejudice. It will certainly help your existing employees understand the types of roles your organization will need in the coming years.

Mary (39:03.063)
So to what you just said, they can train up accordingly, right? It kind of helps them to bridge to the next chapter. And speaking of which, organizations in my mind should train recruiters, senior leadership, and all hiring managers on generational considerations as part of your acquisition strategy. I would say take a page from the great work that many have done.

in the neurodivergent candidate space and mirror this for other cohorts. I'm going to re -say that. Speaking of which, organizations should train recruiters, senior leadership, and all hiring managers on generational considerations as part of your acquisition strategy. Take a page from the great work many are doing to support neurodivergent candidates and mirror this

for other cohorts. And consider the age performance paradox, which says that while older Americans are undervalued during the recruiting process, the data shows that once hired, they perform generally the same, if not better, than their younger peers. And finally, add age to your DE and I programs. I was shocked to find that only

8 % of companies include age in DE &I. As with gender, race, and sexual orientation, ensure age -related metrics are tracked across the employee lifecycle. It's old news that diversity and inclusion are strategic imperatives. So remember that knowledge and experience are precious commodities. And by the way, older Americans are also your customers and investors.

So Katie, this was a great show. I'm glad our audience suggested it

Katie (41:07.086)
Completely agree and please keep the great feedback and the recommendations coming. Bye for now.

Mary (41:16.119)
Bye.

Katie (41:19.214)
Bye bye. All right, see you on the other side.