Another day at the office. The room is almost deserted (it is lunchtime after all) and there’s a sense that some of the spark has gone in the wake of last week’s announced redundancies, even though many of those facing lay-offs have since been told they’re safe … for the moment.
That sort of news tends to make you feel your age. I know I do … or don’t (just how old do I feel?). The new watchword is: “Advance”.
Now we’re all on the lookout for new business, of which there does seem to be plenty around.
Yesterday, for instance, we spoke to a potential client who is facing somewhat of a meltdown in their fortunes with Google: They’ve dropped from multiple Position 4s and 5s to somewhere around 40 and 50 on several keywords.
I won’t bore you with the details of Search Engine Optimisation or Increased Conversion (however, if you’d like me to bore you on those subjects feel free to drop me a line), that’s not why I’m taking you down this path. What the point is actually is that this company had fought shy of doing business with a search agency because the last one they tangled with saddled them with a child for an account manager.
Benefits of Experience
Well, that’s maybe a little harsh. Perhaps not a child; however, they did say that an having an account manager who’d only just got the vote made them feel less valued by the agency in question.
This helped with the sales pitch because I was able to say to them, truthfully, that I had once applied to work for this agency and had failed, but not before being told by a third party that they thought I was the “best technical SEO they’d never hire”.
Why? Basically, I was too old.
UK employment law explicitly states that employers are not allowed to discriminate on the grounds of age but it’s quite plain to see that they do: anyone over 30 is said to be inflexible or hard to manage.
It’s also likely that older workers are deemed to be more expensive: you can hire young’uns, without families and mortgages and commitments for much less than it costs to employ an old codger.
The counter argument to this is that young bloods are less experienced (not just in business methods but also in life skills), poisoned by youthful ambition (they think they know it all) and, quite often, here one minute and gone the next (a function of their lack of commitments).
The upshot here is that our would-be client actually felt reassured by the fact that their possible account manager (i.e. me) had a wealth of previous experience — quite a bit of it in their own sector — and a few grey hairs (well, quite a lot actually; I started going grey at the age of 14).
Nevertheless, like many people these days, my age worries me a lot. Not because I think I’m going senile or that I can’t cut it with the young Turks, but because potential employers might think that.
This isn’t a new fear: I’ve had it for five or six years. The Cult of Yoof is strong in my chosen field, and especially in London.
Yet the news is that we may all be working for much longer before we can afford to retire, if we ever can. So there will be more older people fearing that the next round of job cuts may mean that they’re on a direct line to the scrap heap. This represents a real loss to the potential prosperity of the world: a loss of experience.
George Santayana said:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.
But what of those who have no history to remember, yet are convinced of their own youthful infallibility?
By favouring cheap youth, companies could be condemning themselves to a whole new round of making the mistakes they made 20 years ago.
Stacking the Equation
In my own field I notice that the “rules” touted around as the latest thinking on website design and usability closely mirror the “rules” I learned as a sub-editor on local newspapers, and they were old when I got to hear about them.
What goes around, comes around.
I personally manage a “graduate level” team and I’m always amazed at the novelty they bring to the work in hand, but every day I regularly get the chance to say (even to myself) “been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt”.
Another old saying has it that: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. I’m living proof that that ain’t so.
I’ve always said that you can’t make sweeping generalisations, but I’ll make an exception here.
The value for money equation is not quite so simple as saying: newer is better. Give us old codgers a try!
We know how to vote and everything.
Related articles
- Loyalty is a two way street (piaw.blogspot.com)
- The internet sector is maturing, two more signs (theequitykicker.com)
- Communicating bad news (slideshare.net)
- My Friend Was Just Laid Off! Dealing with Layoff Survivor Syndrome (brighthub.com)
- New layoff notification law takes effect (gazetteonline.com)
