Surely no-one actually watches TV at 6:20 in the morning, but my fate today was an interview at this hour with Kate Silverton on BBC Breakfast. Answering these media calls of duty sometimes brings one sharing a breakfast trolley with other studio guests. Today a group of young life guards were there in smart RNLI wet suits, fresh from saving 36 children from a collapsing sand bank in the sea at Tenby. Imagine the gratitude of those mums and dads, not to mention the kids they fished out of the waves. I take my hat off to them; a brave, sparky little group. They had clearly done a great job and were bubbling over with the excitement of it.
My role today was to talk about TAEN’s latest survey of 50+ jobseekers. This is the second time we have run this survey and now we can compare trends from two samples of participants. A time series of surveys is in prospect. This one looks at periods before and after the recession. Recessions never bring good news on the job seeking front, but make no mistake about it; for the older job seeker, life has just got tougher.
Redundancy has taken its toll; the number citing redundancy as the cause of their unemployment was 47 per cent - up from 32 per cent in the pre-recession period. Now a sense of urgency is more evident – 39 per cent said they were “desperate” to get a job, compared with 30 per cent previously.
The demands of our 50+ jobseekers seem modest, while their tragedies are palpable. “I don’t want to claim UK benefits as I have not fully contributed,” said one jobseeker - a woman aged over 65. She continues, “I just want a job – any job to ensure a survival standard of living.”
Another (a man in his 50s) comments, “All I want is to find rewarding, challenging employment to get me out of this downward spiral of debt and having to rely on state handouts.” A woman in her 60s writes, “I am bored with being at home all the while. At my age I require employment now. It will be too late in one or two year’s time.” Another woman in her 50s says, “I am very unhappy to be out of work and very nervous about my financial position.”
Most worrying however, are the reasons for their difficulties in getting work. Numbers citing the stock reasons of health problems, lack of skills, experience or qualifications all fell over the period. On the other hand, increasing numbers of candidates could only explain their failure in terms of employers’ ageist attitudes. In the earlier period, 63 per cent said they felt they were seen as “too old” by employers, but by the second survey this response had risen to 72 per cent. And while in the first survey, 42 per cent of respondents had been told they were “too experienced or over qualified,” in the second sample falling during the recession period, this figure had risen to 48 per cent.
Again, the individual comments of these older jobseekers tell their own story. A woman in her 50s writes, “I am fed up with the jobs for which I apply going to the ‘girlie’ clones of the interviewers.” Another says, “After caring for a long period, I now find that I do not exist!”
Of course, these are the voices of the job hunters themselves that we are hearing; others might tell a different story. But what comes across is both an eagerness and determination to work coupled with a sense of hurt and disappointment to be discarded in this way. Their feelings and experiences of ageism are too widespread to dismiss as “all in the mind”.
Somehow, in their passion and desire to be doing a job well, I feel many of our 50+ jobseekers are probably not so different from the Tenby life guards: eager to show they can do it, probably capable and competent too, only no-one will be putting them on TV at Breakfast time and telling them how great they are.
But with the recession making it harder to get back into work and every workless month exacerbating the problem, feelings are soaring that the private and public job agencies don’t really understand; and beliefs are strengthening that age discrimination legislation hasn’t really helped them much. Our 50+ jobseekers feel marooned. If job hunting has the equivalent of shifting sands and a rip tide, this is it!