There comes a time, no one knows exactly when, when your work experience starts to work against you.
If you’ve not experienced this, you’ll have to just imagine it. You suddenly wake up to the realisation that your impressive CV is somehow harming your prospects. It’s a bitter pill to swallow because it’s hard to understand.
How could a company not benefit from your breadth of skills and experience?
You might not have given this problem a passing thought – probably because it gets noticeably less attention than other type of discrimination. In fact, many people would rather pretend it doesn’t happen. But it does.
Our kind of people
The thing is, employers are likely to ask the following questions while mapping the talent they need for roles:
How will they fit in with the rest of the team? Are they innovative? Will they be in it for the long run?
But, if an employer is serious about catching unconscious bias in action, before asking those questions, it’s worth exploring each one in depth:
How can we look for people who ‘fit’ without hiring the same sort of person each time? What are we actually asking for in an innovative person? Does ‘long-term commitment’ really impact the value a person can bring?
This isn’t only a tech industry problem, of course, and that’s why we’re well aware of the work that’s underway to improve diversity and inclusion in business. That said, it does seem to be noticeably worse in tech, and age definitely doesn’t get enough attention considering the scale of the problem.
According to CW Jobs, 41% of tech sector workers said they’ve witnessed age discrimination in the workplace, compared to 27% across other UK industries.
Why is ageism a bigger problem in technology?
In the tech world, things move really fast, not just for workers but consumers, too. As new platforms come online, all vying for their share of the attention economy, they nearly always cater to those who are most likely to immediately embrace them – the young. For everyone else, it can feel a bit like you’re on the outside looking in – a prime example of digital ageism. This creates a cultural divide at work between those ‘in the know’, and those who aren’t. This is a particularly lonely place to be if you’re already noticeably outnumbered by your younger colleagues.
Verbal abuse impacts older tech workers, too, but it’s often casually written off as ‘banter’. This type of harassment at work can lead to mental health and confidence issues, causing career problems later down the line.
Age discrimination in the workplace is also not an issue that only impacts scrappy start-ups. In 2007, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made this ageist remark: “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.”