To think job market for those 55 and over is dire

[Bettyfordtoday]

At 55, and recently made redundant from a highly paid corporate role I am struggling to get another role or even an interview.

I'm wondering what others do at this age point, too young to retire but seemingly too old to interview ?

Have a mortgage etc to pay and don't want to get in debt , redundancy pay will last if I am careful to the end of the year at most

If you've tried all these things on their own and they didn't make much of a dent then do push for more than one preventative at a time. Everyday migraines is a pretty untenable situation. I've been under the care of my Neurologist for 20 years now and tried pretty much everything but I seem to need stacked treatments to get any relief.

The job market is dire for everyone. A result of the retirement age going up, so people who would have retired are still working, this not freeing up jobs for younger people, and the high birth rate in the years 2005-2008 - those babies are now just nearly all over 18 and a lot of them are looking for the jobs that are blocked by the over 60s who cannot retire.

The government would have you believe it's all down to AI of course.

The care industry is friendly to people aged over 50. You could walk into a job being a carer or support worker with the potential to earn up to £4k a month. There's also bank work, if you want more flexibility.

I don't understand remarks like that either! I was using a computer at college in the late 1980s. I was hardly unusual. At the same time, my mum had a computer at work. She retired in 1992, and continued with 'tech' until her nineties.

Who are these people my age who don't know how to use it? I find it baffling that there could possibly be more than a tiny minority who are clueless.

100% agree with this.
it’s a such a cliche that ‘old’ people can’t pick up new technology. Of course we can, we’ve been doing it for 30 years.

I’ve gone from a paper based customer databases to AI-driven customer automation with every stop inbetween. I can see how
much the world has changed and embrace it. I’m still training, still picking up new skills.

its Really frustrating to run into this attitude that 50 year olds are too old to understand tech.

Try the civil service. I got in a year ago in the ONS and I’m now transferring to the CPS - applied externally too

Agree the older person 'bad at IT' trope is tiresome. At 63, I am ahead of most of my colleagues with IT. I also got a job at 58 in the civil service. Also agree that this peri and menopause obsession is making things harder for women. I wasn't affected adversely at work by either and hadn't even heard of peri.

There is some good CV advice here. Unfortunately it's much harder to actually knock years off your age now like my Dad did in the eighties when job seeking in his late fifties.

Agree! I have just officially moved into a complex IT related role at 55, from a totally different role within the same company. If I had applied to another place for the same job, I would have had no chance but because they knew me, and knew I was good at it and keen to learn, they deemed me more suitable than recruiting outside.

Right! I am mid 50s and am one of the people that everyone comes to with tech questions.

I’m also one of the people seriously examining how we can use AI at work. I use it daily.

Our Director of Business Apps is my age, as is our VP of IT.

I was hired because I did (measurably) know more than all the other applicants. One of them ended up being hired as my assistant.

I think this must be quite specific to your workplace. I've found the opposite in my engineering/high tech workplace- the over 50s have been quickest to pick up AI and are better with tech generally as they grew up with it evolving and have experienced rapid changes in technology. The younger generation have been used to tech being neatly packaged up and really don't understand it to the same extent as those that experienced it being built from what I've seen.

I retrained in my 30s and found age discrimination even back then too when going for junior roles. Despite the fact they wouldn’t give me the senior roles due to my lack of experience in that particular field, they had an attitude of wanting young people for junior roles.

I was hired by a Public relations agency straight after I completed my masters in PR at age 32. I had redacted some information including the graduation date for my undergrad and certain previous work experience so they assumed I was early 20s.

I never put my school qualifications, seems pointless with all the other qualifications I’ve got since plus it was so long ago. I remember this one woman at th groups interview. She was probably my age - but unlike me she looked it. She was brilliant and knew a lot more than most there but I immediately got the impression that they didn’t really like her. And I found out later she wasn’t one of the ones they selected for the role.

Well I was selected and at this glitzy PR agency I soon found out they treated junior staff terrible. One of them let slip they were furious when they found out my age from HR as they figured that’s why I was challenging them.

I left that to another job and then eventually this role that I’ve been in for quite a while. If I had to start applying for jobs again as a late 30s woman I’d probably fudge things on my cv and LinkedIn once more - so they think I’m several years younger.

It’s outrageous that it has to be done though. Well it doesn’t have to be done but it does help me.

Tbh I keep pointing this out to older colleagues when they claim not to know basics. I think some people don't do any favours to others of that ages with the strategic incompetence. It just keeps the stereotype alive

List less work history.

There's no rule saying you need to.put every date ever or every job you ever did. Don't list the dates for qualifications.

That said - be realistic. We all get slower as we age, I can see it in myself, I am less able to rapidly learn new things and my processing speed has dropped. You need to focus on roles where deep experience & strategic leadership is worth more, where you are not competing with 30 year olds.

If this isn't an option, you may to accept taking a pay cut and looking at lower paid roles who may see you as more of a bargain.

I work in this industry and have never heard of support workers getting more than around £28, 30k tops. Even the managers aren't on much more than mid 30s.

This is very true. But younger people will often accept lower pay.

We need to normalise pay peaking mid 40s and then dropping as we become less productive. Most older people aren't competitive when applying for roles because they are simply quite expensive.

Been there twice in my career when two jobs offer at nearly the same time. Both times I honoured my acceptance of the first and both times I regretted it. I would say take the one you prefer and don't worry about the loyalty to your word. Most employers would be as ruthless if they needed to be.

How can a carer earn 4k a month?

I also have O Levels but list them as GCSEs. They were exactly equivalent (allegedly) so I see no harm in it.

I went to uni and qualified as an academic later in life. I took everything before my first degree off my CV and included only a brief mention that I had worked in librarianship. There were only recent dates with my degrees. I found that in that profession no one was in the least interested what I had done before my first degree. I could have been a bank robber for all they knew.

The whole job market has been terrible for some time in the UK and some other countries too.
It's actually worst for those under 25 years. The highest rates of unemployment is amongst new graduates. I'm sure it is rubbish for > 50s too which is awful considering that this group is expected to work until 67/68, up to 18 years more.
Sadly, I think the situation is going to get much worse rather than better so worth getting something now if you can, even if it involves reduced responsibilities and salary.
@Bettyfordtoday with a high paying career and a large redundancy package, you are in a much better situation than most people being made redundant. Good luck with finding something else.

Where do you make that money in the care industry without working illegal and potentially dangerous shifts? Would really like to know ! Are you in the UK?

I’m not talking about ‘knowing how to use a computer’ or using Microsoft Word or Excel. Of course everyone knows the basics that have been around for decades. Tech has become an awful lot more advanced since then (at least in my industry) and what I’m seeing is that people are struggling to adapt.

I’d just change that to GCSEs and if asked just explain that most people under 40 have never heard of O levels so you called them GCSEs for clarity. My DSis was the last year to do O levels and she’s almost 55 now.

OP, take the dates off your qualifications and only put the last 10-15 years of jobs with a note to say ‘previous non-relevant roles available on request’. Focus on skills, highlighting those you’ll bring to a new role.

I find this hilarious. I have worked in tech since the IBM PC was released when I was 18 so solidly for 40 years. I have colleagues who have done the same. None of us has any issue with the new systems which arrive every year. I'm just starting another system implementation this week.
Perhaps your colleagues slowness at picking up new systems is down to something else.