That’s my belief as well. A lot of people now in their 60s had tech forced upon them after they were well into their careers. Some adapted well but it’s true that training may have been lacking. It’s quite different for workers who grew up with it. The problem is, training is expensive and employers already have job-/company-specific training to be done for new hires. If you also need to remediate computer literacy in addition, it’s an extra hurdle. For some exceptional older hires, it may be worth the extra cost but it’d be naive to dismiss that it’s a factor in the hiring decision.
But practically this is not how the hiring decision is made. I don’t blindly assume that an older recruit is computer inept if they show evidence of experience in that area, but considering the trends, this is something I will double check during interview/screening whereas I may not look as closely into it for a millennial.
Ok. but if you’re ruling out old people because ‘training is expensive’ then you should also rule out anyone who dosen’t have on the job experience because 'training is expensive. So no old people and no young people.
By the way, just want to say for the record I’m not trying to be argumentative here so sorry if I’m seeming so. So please don’t take my comments to anyone here personally or anything.
I’m just kinda knowingly debating this in circles for the entertainment factor. But if thats annyoning then I can stop. I think I’ve said enough on the topic.
Except that training is a long term investment. Which goes back to my previous comment about how you dont hire older people because as soon as they are on-board they already have one foot out the door via their imminent retirement. If you’re spending a year getting a person settled in and comfortable with your technology, you are hoping they’ll stick around for another 20 years, not another 20 months. Of course that young person may not stick around either, but you know for certain the old person has a built-in cap on the return you’ll get for the investment.
I think all the talk about training, literacy, etc are just symptoms of the real [unsolvable] problem - time. Most young workers have up to 50 years of future career up for grabs, while old people dont have/cant offer the time necessary to make the investment in them worthwhile.
Not annoying. It’s worth discussing which is why I keep replying.
Discrimination is a bad word in our society, but literally every single person discriminates almost daily and most of the time there’s nothing wrong with it. It may suck for the person being discriminated against, and it sucks even more if they don’t have control over the reason they were discriminated against, but you can’t expect humans to act like robots concerning other humans that aren’t robots. Businesses aren’t charities. Hiring decisions need to make business sense.
When I hired my most recent staff member, it was between a young guy starting out his career and an older woman established in her career. I picked the older woman because I knew I wouldn’t have an advancement path to offer the young guy and he’d be gone in 3 years, whereas the older woman had been an accountant for over a decade and had no need to “move up” as long as her pay was competitive. The older lady is not great with our systems and I would bet money the younger guy would have picked it up sooner, but that would have only been a short term benefit. I cared more about a long term hiring solution. So there’s proof that sometimes the career-based discrimination works in reverse in terms of age. I seriously looked at it from a career progression perspective, not an age perspective - not because age would have made the decision illegal - but because it seriously mattered if the young person was looking to move up soon.
If someone is wondering if they are actually practicing age discrimination vs career length/prospect discrimination, just ask yourself, if this 48 year old had the same experience and same short/long term career goals as a 28 year old, would it make my decision harder? If not, then you are discriminating based on AGE. If it would make it harder, then you are clearly basing your decision more on their careers.
Also, if it just sounds like I’m justifying my age discrimination against a young person, not actually explaining that there are legit forms of discrimination during hiring that are not illegal and not immoral that, to an outsider, could look like age discrimination, feel free to point that out.