At 49, I’ve just learned I’m in my “late career” era, according to a recent marketing graphic from the job search giant Indeed. That’s what work is like for us 45- to 55-year-olds, following “Exploration” (21-25), “Establishment” (25-35) and “Mid-career” (35-45).
Late career! I have only been doing this for 14 years (the less said about the decade lost to the law the better) and this bald characterisation has given me full-on existential vertigo. It’s worse than when my best friend told me last year I was “probably peaking”, which I obviously heard as “freewheeling towards death”. Why even bother staggering on?
It could, actually, be worse. The 55-65 age bracket got “Decline”. No wonder the grey-haired cartoon hipster on the graphic is stroking his grizzled chin in apparent perplexity at being consigned to the professional knacker’s yard when he looks as if he could have at least 20 more years in him modelling for M&S.
Is this what they think women over 45 look like??? pic.twitter.com/lBEqCgPn7K
— Terri Gerstein (@TerriGerstein) September 4, 2022
These graphics are invariably a terrible idea, worse even than guessing someone’s age. One, a couple of years ago, illustrating a women’s “walking challenge”, showed the character representing my age group with a shampoo-and-set hairdo, flowery cardie and walking stick. The 55-60 woman was stooped, with exaggerated wrinkles. At least the 65-plus looked cool, with her furry wrap, dangly earrings and Bond-villain white cat. The content consultant Grant Feller recently described seeing a marketing presentation with age brackets for a household-name product: “the oldest of which – ‘retired’ – was identified with a picture of a woman walking around a supermarket with a walking frame”. If nothing else, you need the “decline era” demographic in the workplace to point these kinds of howlers out.
Indeed’s graphic was swiftly deleted (though not swiftly enough to avoid raising the blood pressure of people who actually need to worry about our blood pressure, thanks), but it’s wild it ever existed. Are its creators aware of the current projections for retirement ages? HM government gives my pensionable age as 67 – well over the rainbow bridge beyond Indeed’s “decline” – not that I actually believe it will happen. Assuming we are still living above ground and journalism exists, I fully anticipate keeling over my keyboard at 87 (my life expectancy prediction). There’s no money left, as Keir Starmer – in the twilight of his decline era at 62 – told us last month. It’s also predicated on a linear career narrative that barely exists now. Multiple and evolving careers are becoming so common that my legal dead-end can be reframed as trailblazing, rather than reflective of disastrous life choices. Perhaps.
Any “decline” is more the product of prejudice than of some intrinsic enfeeblement: the place where most over-50s experience ageism is at work, according to recent research. In July, an engineering executive who had been called an “old fossil” and dismissed was awarded £3.2m from his employer, Vesuvius, which had implemented a policy of not recruiting workers over 45.
That’s daft: for purely economic reasons we need plenty of older workers. Remember all that hand-wringing not long ago about the “Great Retirement”: over-50s leaving the workplace? Also, workplaces with older workers have lower employee turnover and seem to do better: research found that those with a 10% higher than average share of workers aged 50 and over are 1.1% more productive. At the human level, older people add invaluable perspective, experience and the ability to look you in the eye, as several did for me in the past, and say: “It’s fine. No one died.”
If nothing else, older workers are grist for the comedy marketing content mill. I don’t know if you’ve encountered the “scripted (or edited) by our gen Z intern” TikTok trend, where bemused but game older people are made to walk around their place of work and say wearing a hard hat is “very main character energy” , or that their museum’s vintage tram “slaps”. I especially like one from London’s Trinity Buoy Wharf, where a middle-aged chap has been ruthlessly gen Z edited until he’s mainly saying “ship”. They’re a nice piece of intergenerational workplace fun. Maybe Indeed should make one?
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
