Why Over-45s — Not Millennials — Represent the Future of the Workforce
Not a day goes by without some media or HR professional obsessing over ‘Millennials’. But what if the age group everyone should obsess over was different? What if it was the over-45s who held the key to the future of work? Our society is ageing fast. The median age of the workers is now higher than it’s ever been. And we can predict with absolute certainty that it will increase in the future. No company (let alone country) will be able to function without those over 45, who also happen to feel younger than ever before.
It’s probably because they are ignored or neglected by traditional employers that more and more of the over-45s turn to freelancing. As our society ages, we are increasingly reluctant to see the elephant in the room and instead we turn to a global cult of youth that is equally harmful to the young and the not-so-young. There are many reasons why our vision of age and work is flawed. Being over 45 doesn’t mean you’re not ‘dynamic’. Being a millennial doesn’t mean you’re tech-savvy. One thing is certain, the over-45s have a bright future nobody should ignore any longer.
Our society is ageing fast. Super fast.
In concrete terms, it means that more than half the population will be over 45 in most Western countries within a decade. The median age is “the point at which half the population is older than that age and half is younger”. In most developed countries, it is now above 40: in the UK it is 40.2, in France it is 41 (see the Insee statistics here), in Germany it is 47, and in Japan it is 47.3! In many ways, Japan, the world’s oldest country, is showing the way for us all. According to The World Economic Forum, Japan’s workforce is expected to be 20% smaller by 2040. The country decided recently to ease immigration restrictions to “fill chronic care worker shortage”. And Japan’s IT engineers shortage has reached a critical stage that is causing unprecedented retention problems.
Workers are ageing too. Retirement age is increasing everywhere across the Western world. In France the full retirement age is to be increased gradually from 65 to 67 years by 2023. In Germany it is also to be increased to 67 by 2029. But that’s just the legal age. The reality is that more people are working longer either because they have to — their pensions aren’t sufficient — or because they want to. The US Census Bureau recorded the highest number ever of people over 85 working in the US! (And that’s not by choice, sadly).
Most careers will span over 40 to 50 years. For companies it means that talent development will become ever more important. For individuals it means that cultivating transformational assets will become increasingly critical. It won’t be possible to do the same job for five decades: because the said job is likely to disappear or be transformed and it would probably be too boring anyway. That’s why more workers over 45 will choose to become freelancers to develop their careers, leverage their professional network and acquire new skills. Indeed, as Malt’s freelancers study of 2019 suggests, freelancers aren’t all millennials, far from it, since the average age on the platform is 34. Increasingly freelancing could become key in a career made of multiple phases.
Ageism is killing us.
Ageism, defined as “prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a person’s age,” is a paradox: the more we age, the more we discriminate against the old. The older we get, the bigger the cult of youth. Unfortunately “ageism is becoming a major issue for corporations.” A study by Spherion showed that about 25% of employees “make judgments about their co-workers’ and supervisors’ abilities to do their job based on their age alone”.
Ageism is rife in the world of recruiting and many people over 40 fear discrimination when they look for a new job. That fear is particularly acute in the tech world: “startup leaders say age bias is rampant in tech by age 36”, says Quartz. Ageism also causes tremendous stress: “experiencing discrimination on a regular basis is a real blow to our self-esteem. And that raises the level of the stress hormone cortisol in the body”. (For more on stress, see this interesting interview about what stress is.)
More profoundly, ageism is a prejudice targeting our own future selves. We like the over-45s in our lives (our mothers, uncles or friends) and we all hope to grow older (it’s always better than the alternative, right?), but we discriminate against them as professionals. It shows a disconnect between our present selves and our future selves, that can only be harmful.
Ageism is the main reason why a lot of older professionals, for example consultants, take their professional fates into their own hands by becoming self-employed. If employers do not take demography into account, they are bound to see their pipeline of talented candidates shrink further. A Sixty And Me article wonders if freelancing could be the cure to age discrimination.
Let’s stop obsessing over ‘millennials’
Our obsession with ‘millennials’ is based on two flawed premises: the first is that ‘millennials’ represent the future (which is demographically incorrect); the second is that ‘millennials are different. In fact, when it comes to work, millennials aren’t different from other age groups. “Research Confirms What We All Suspected. Millennials in the Workplace Are Not That Different From Other Generations” is the title of an enlightening Inc. article on the subject. They want the same things at work as everyone else.
In an HBR article titled “What Do Millennials Really Want at Work? The Same Things the Rest of Us Do”, Bruce Pfau writes, “a growing body of evidence suggests that employees of all ages are much more alike than different in their attitudes and values at work.” Another article in HR Executive says that “stories about how millennials are different than people who are in their 50s now tell us nothing useful, because they confuse ‘age effects’ with ‘cohort effects’”. In other words when people do act differently it is because of where they are in the course of their lives, not because they are of a ‘generation’ that is essentially different.
Last but not least, millennials don’t really exist as a marketing segment. Age stereotypes are as short-sighted as any sexist or racist generalisation that is usually decried. You should market to ‘people’, not to ‘millennials’!
Cultivating transformational assets: the thing of the future
In increasingly long careers freelancing is likely to become a phase in everybody’s life: to have more time to care for a parent or a child, to transition to a new job, to learn new skills or just to earn additional revenues. In a remarkable book titled The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity — read my review of the book here — Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott write about the consequences of longevity on work, companies and HR. If our work lives last four or five decades, we will have to cultivate our ability to transform ourselves and develop new skills and networks. “Long lives are lives of transitions (…) Simply following the herd is not going to work,” they write. These “transformational assets” empower us to keep strong cognitive skills, brain plasticity and curiosity. Going back to school, learning a new trade, developing a new network… these are all things that are done more and more often by people over 40.
Not only do we live and work longer, we also keep a lot of the qualities that are now attributed only to the young: dynamism, creativity, enthusiasm and the ability to learn new things. It’s high time HR people realised that!
