Advocates pushing for improving older worker employability opportunities correctly identify the need for HR professionals to revise existing company recruiting practices.

Well, if we ever needed proof of the accelerating population ageing trend within Australia, newspaper reports were happy to provide it. The proportion of people over age of 65 has reached a record high of 17.1% whilst the proportion of people 17 or younger, which in the late 1970’s was 31% has fallen to 21.6%.

We are seeing increasing examples of older workers being embraced in front line roles across hospitality, retail and service industries. However, this positive trend is not translating into the managerial and professional space. Anti-ageism advocates and diversity professionals argue…

Over our Christmas break we had a chance to catch up with two major research studies of last year examining global predictions surrounding the evolution of older workforces and the ongoing business change resistance to the trend.

In our final post for the year, we reflect on whether 2023 has seen encouraging progress towards age-inclusive workforces. Any move in this direction will suggest a loosening of ageism’s grip on business thinking.

September saw the release of a major Government initiative to address our nation’s growing social inequality with a focus paper on the creation of sustainable work for everyone who in the future wants a job.

Often ageism is singularly associated with personal bias. Overcome a personal bias towards ageism so conventional wisdom goes and issues of age -based discrimination become a distant memory. Yet

we know this is not true.

In workplace settings the idea we carry within us a variety of preconditioned biases regarding sex, race and age has given impetus to the growth of the ‘unconscious bias’ training industry.

The training pitch argues that in helping us become aware of our hidden biases, we create more diverse and inclusive workforces that deliver improved business performance.

While a laudable objective, most of this training is proving ineffective.

We are beginning to witness an increasing interest in the popular book industry of the social impacts of the global ageing population trend. Yet, this apparent discovery of a new global issue requiring some form of government and business response is misleading. The issue of population ageing has been well-known for over thirty years and largely ignored by governments of all persuasions.

Old men have sure being occupying media headlines over recent months.

Joe Biden seeking re-election as US President at age 82; Trump in Court at 78; Rupert Murdoch continuing to deeply influence Fox News at age 92; 80-year-old Harrison Ford going around again as Indiana Jones and now Robert DeNiro a father at 79. Not to forget Charles becoming King at the relatively young age of 74! Who thought a career as a gerontologist could suddenly make you a media celebrity and ‘life of the party’!

Have you ever stopped to think that an organisation’s focus on ‘busyness’ is a clever way to distract us from questioning the way it might behave? The answer is ‘probably not’ as you don’t have a moment to take a breath!

You, like us, might remember the original ‘Perfect Match’ TV show now getting an updated rerun on Netflix. In the search for romance, an individual participant would ask a series of questions to three other hidden participants…

January 2023 saw louder signals emerging - reinforcing the global demographic trend towards ageing populations. We need to overturn the institutionalised view that an ageing population is a social and economic negative and instead explore how an older demography can be a source of opportunity and value.

Reconciling ‘organisation fit’ with diversity and inclusion practices is challenging.

Whilst diversity suggests workforce difference, ‘organisation fit’ emphasises workforce sameness.

For some time now many large organisations have complicated the hiring process by not just being satisfied with an evidence-based analysis of a person’s skill sets and ability to apply them, but adding highly subjective labels including ‘potential’ and ‘organisation fit’ into the recruitment decision-making process. Does this improve hiring decisions?

The corporate equivalent of a Goldilocks and the three bears scenario seems to exist, in which younger workers have too little experience, older workers have the wrong experience, with those workers between the mid-20s and 40s having just the right experience. Yet, in the worlds of…

Employers believe that the cut-back in Government-sponsored skilled migration programme is the primary cause of our labour crises. Yet, the potential recruiting of younger and older workers as part of the solution remains overlooked.

Another misconception about older workers is the characterisation of older workers as “hard to get along with” and “lacking resilience”.

As we have learnt in our articles exploring older worker misconceptions, false impressions abound which ignore the research evidence about the positive business opportunity represented by the older worker.

Welcome to our EncourAGEEQUALITY quiz. What do instant noodles, bifocal glasses, the Victa lawnmower, KFC and Roget’s Thesaurus all have in common?

Lost in the translation is the complexity of work roles older workers may be performing, the experience needed to perform these roles, the belief that older workers retain significant labour market bargaining power and the disregard off business cost offsets the older worker provides.