Why Experience Is Becoming Your Biggest Career Advantage, With Dan Pontefract
Everyone talks about AI as the future of work. But what if the bigger story is something we’re overlooking?
In this episode, JR speaks with leadership strategist and author Dan Pontefract about why experience—not youth—may become one of the most valuable assets in tomorrow’s workplace. As workforces age and labor shortages grow, Dan argues that organizations must rethink how they hire, develop, and retain talent—or risk losing decades of knowledge and expertise.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why demographic change may have a bigger impact on work than AI
What “age debt” is—and why organizations aren’t prepared for it
How ageism affects professionals at every stage of their careers
Why traditional generational labels may be doing more harm than good
Dan’s “Rivers, Rocks, and Rubies” framework for understanding career growth
How organizations can turn experience into a competitive advantage instead of treating it as a cost
What professionals can do to build careers that remain relevant and rewarding for decades
Whether you’re just starting your career, leading a team, or thinking about what’s next in your 50s, 60s, and beyond, this conversation will challenge many of the assumptions we’ve long held about work, careers, and retirement. You’ll come away with a new perspective on why experience may be one of the greatest advantages you can build—and why the organizations that recognize its value will be the ones best positioned to succeed in the years ahead.
Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dan-pontefract.
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Why Experience Is Becoming Your Biggest Career Advantage, With Dan Pontefract
The world of work has a demographic problem, but most organizations and their leaders are pretending it doesn’t exist. We are living longer and working longer. Yet, somehow, we are still building and running organizations that behave like careers, ending at 65 with a cliff where you just stop working fully one day. We’re practicing subtle and, frankly, not so subtle ageism for anybody in their 50s. In the meantime, we’re seeing experience walk out the door. There aren’t enough younger workers to fully fill the gaps. The people in the middle are being stretched thinner and thinner.
We talked endlessly about the future of work, particularly related to topics like AI, flexibility and culture but we’re missing one of the biggest shifts that’s happening out there. It’s hiding in plain sight. The workforce is getting older. It is also getting more complex. What if the future of work isn’t young or disruptive but grey? Our guest Dan Pontefract is making a point that we’re facing something he calls the age debt. A slow-building crisis that organizations aren’t prepared for but he also sees an opportunity.
What if experience isn’t a liability to manage but an advantage to unlock? In his new book, The Future of Work Is Grey, he challenges everything we think we know about generations, career journeys and what it takes to build organizations that work for everyone and for the long run. I’m JR. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.
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Dan, thank you for joining me on the show.
Thanks, JR. Thrilled to be here.
I appreciate that. Congrats on your new book, The Future of Work Is Grey. Let’s get into it. You talk about something you described is the age debt. What’s the simplest way to explain that to the uninitiated?
It’s like a head in the sand of four key things, demographic change, ageism and inability to see and how to capture wisdom. The fact that we’re living longer, but no one is prepared for it.
You hit at this point that we’re living in the world of the past where people retired at 65. It was a hard cut off. You went from working full-time one day to trying to figure out what to do with your life the next day. That’s not how we’ll want it so much anymore but most organizations and their leaders are still operating in that world. Why is that?
It’s a cracking of the code I was trying to do within the book and I still don’t have an answer, quite frankly. I’ll say two things. First of all, there is an antiquated way of thinking that has just leached itself onto the point like, what is the definition of retirement? It happens in Japan at 60. It happens in Germany at 62 and North America at 65. That’s how we’ve always done it. The organizational and societal norms are that, and that’s a problem I would say.
The second thing is individual. We continue to think, “There’s this golden watch date. I’m 65 or whatever the date is, and then I’m going to be free.” I’m sure you see these stories. Lots of individuals a year or two years in are like, A) I’m bored out of my mind. B) I am lacking a sense of purpose for whatever is I want to do next because I’ve done enough golf and gardening to fill an entire Mars planet up with. C) They slowly look at the 401(k) or other savings. They’re like, “That’s going down faster than I thought or I didn’t save enough. What am I going to do now?”
I’m at that point in my life. I was working in corporate jobs up until 2025. I now run my own business. The question is, is that all I do or do I fill other things around it? I wasn’t ready to quit working and yet I was thrust into that model. I’m sure you found out by doing the research for your book and maybe personal experience, it gets a lot harder to find work when you get older. There is a lot of ageism out there. It just doesn’t feel like the world is geared for taking advantage of people who are like me. Not that this is about me, but people who want to keep working maybe less than full-time and maybe in a more flexible way but not just flip the switch completely off.
Your spot on JR. Whether you’ve been involuntarily removed from your role and/or organization at the same time. You’re like, “I didn’t expect that.” We, as individuals, and also, again, back to organizations are creating these constructs that are from the ‘60s or ‘70s. It’s still there now. That is, the only way to grow your career is to go up the career ladder. Even if you don’t go up the career ladder, you might get stuck halfway there, then you’re stuck. That day comes when you can no longer work for us and we’re going to get rid of you or you will retire yourself from the role you’ve had.
It’s just like, is that the only way? I blame tons of folks. I blame senior leaders in the C-suite who have collected enough of that money as retirement savings to not care. They’re like, “Whatever. This is never going to affect me. I don’t worry about the other 95% of the organization.” I blame HR, PNC or people in culture. Again, they have not paid attention and/or shove this under the rug and the carpet so to say about what is good culture these days.
The sixty-five-year-old career cliff is a relic of the past. Organizations must build models that support longevity, not sudden cutoffs. Share on XAre they planning appropriately for the talent conundrum that they will face from the absolute demographic math that is going to math very soon in North America? There’s lots of blame to go around, but then thirdly the individual. When I’m doing my therapy and counseling sessions for those that reach out and say, “I’ve just been whacked by, name your tech company or name your organization. What should I do? I put 58 resumes and applications out. I’m not getting any callbacks.”
One of the other things we got to be thinking about as individuals is transferability and those skills that you have that you might have to lift and shift over to another industry, another role, or another type of job that you never thought of, but you’re smart. You’ve got scars, and you’ve got wrinkles from all these good experiences. You can transfer those to another type of opportunity that you might not be thinking about. There is blame to go around a lot of different ways.
What’s the biggest consequence of this that you’re seeing in organizations because of the fact that they’re not adapting?
Everyone’s love-hate relationship with Boeing is a pretty good real-life example. You’ve seen over the last 10-12 years, multiple incidents that are public. Let alone the ones that you don’t know about. One thing you can think about from a Boeing perspective, they’ve been public in Congress hearings about what has gone wrong. One of the issues is the fact that they both had voluntary and involuntary departures from a lot of these mechanic roles, operational roles, production roles, etc.
Not only did they lose wisdom that was chopped at the block. Again, either they chose to leave or they didn’t. They’ve had to backfill and figure out where’s the wisdom and how we train new people into these roles. Things are getting missed and things are lost. Things weren’t recorded, so we didn’t have any transfer of that wisdom let alone the capture. There’s one company of a kazillion where we could go into and say, “There might be real-life consequences or real business economic consequences if we are not thinking about talent in different ways. What could Boeing do?”
I’ll give an example with BMW, who’s doing it much better. The same thing. They make cars but they don’t make plans. It’s the same but different. BMW in Germany took a look at their aging workforce and said, “We got a lot of folks over the age of 50. Not a lot of young folks coming up.” In fact, Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in all of Europe. They’re like, “We don’t have a lot of immigration happening. What are we going to do?”
They start a program called the Senior Expert Program. The Senior Expert Program is a way for them to build up the skills of the middle aged leaders and individual contributors so that they know they’re going to move up into these new leadership roles. The people who are in the existing roles, who might be older or what I call Rubies. They’re offered the opportunity to stay full-time or on contract or part-time or whatever they wish to still be at BMW well into their later life. That’s a conscious decision of a C-suite saying, “How can we take care of our organizational talent and repurpose it in different ways?”
I’m sure there are lots of examples of companies that are starting to wake up to the fact that in most of the developed world, more people are aging out of the workforce than are coming into the workforce. It got this whole immigration debate that’s going on in many places. Without immigration, the math is the math. More people are leaving than coming in. It’s going to create, at some point, a labor shortage. Maybe that’s what people want. At the same time, we’ve got all this AI stuff going on and people are saying, “We don’t need as many workers as we used to have.” Maybe the math will end up working out for them but it’s a big gamble.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, to me, it’s too early to tell and it’s a bit of a red herring because tech was over-hired during COVID and post-COVID. Now, they’re just trimming the books and that’s getting all the mainstream media headlines. If you look at the actual data that says, “Is AI doing anything to replace young middle aged or older workers?” It’s nowhere near that. It’s, in fact, complementary rather than replacement. That being said, there are actual examples whereby organizations are not hiring young people.
My book is for all ages. When young people aren’t being offered those out of school internships or first time roles. They’re off doing jobs where they’re overqualified for indeed. Those organizations that aren’t doing the hiring and they’re preventing that friction learning from happening. That young people need to get in order to become more senior experienced people down the road. That, I would suggest leaders need to take a good hard look at from that perspective.
Now, flip it to the other end, to your earlier point. When we make rash decisions about workforce dynamics or talent composition, and then we’re just looking at EBITDA and saying, “JR and Dan, you two are making $200,000 a year. That’s $400,000. We’re going to get rid of you two and we’re going to replace it with a $70,000 individual. Two for one, we’re going to save $330,000.” Now, could you possibly maybe work with JR and Dan in a way that is, first of all, humane but looking at that talent composition as, “Maybe you could get two for one. Those two maybe want to work 50% each for like 3 or 4 or 5 years.”
The $200,000 each is $100,000 or even less. You’re just looking at the economics of your cost and P&L essentially differently so that you don’t lose immediately in 100% all that wisdom and the tacit knowledge that’s basically walking out the door. Both ends of the spectrum, you can see organizations not planning for that demographic inevitability. With immigration cuts, in both Canada and the US from North America perspective, it is inevitable that the over 50 crowd is increasing at a rate faster than the under 30 crowd. For those organizations not thinking about the longer term, you are going to be in for a world of hurt.
How much of the study do you think is exacerbated by the fact that you’ve got this incredible financial pressure that most companies feel to drive better returns, have consistently improving quarterly results and squeeze as much out as they can? Whether for the shareholders or senior management or both. Pushing that experience out the door because it is viewed as expensive and maybe not as productive as they would like it to be.
Generational labels enforce lazy stereotypes. We don't need Boomers or Gen Z tropes; we need to value different career eras. Share on XWe were chatting and I was mentioning how this is rightly or wrongly, my 6th book across the library of Dan Pontefract books. Many years ago, my second book was published. It was called The Purpose Effect. In that book, I basically speak to three types of purpose such as personal purpose, role purpose and organizational purpose. Do you have a sense of purpose in your role at work? Now, why do I bring that up? It’s because it’s been ten years since that book. In the organizational purposes thesis that I suggested, organizations who continue to align with Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy theory, which is essentially at all costs serve the market or the profit seekers for the quarter, which is AKA known as short-termism.
You will rue the day downstream if you’re thinking so short sighted in this with short-termism not thinking about the better health of your org over time. We’ve seen examples of this in the last decade where organizations who are myopic and just thinking in the short term have either fallen off the cliff from a fleet street or Fortune 500 perspective or they’ve had to do remedial efforts of trying to save where their economic value and output is. They might not be as innovative.
Examples could be things like research, motion and blackberry. There’s one perfect example whereby they weren’t thinking it through and then what happened? Everything was for the short term and the company almost went belly up. Now, my point is, you take that short term as I’m thinking and layer on the demographic inevitability that your workforce is shifting from a bell-shaped demography to a light bulb shape demography.
There’s less people in the bottom and way more up at the top. What are you going to do? Are you going to work for the short term or are you going to think about the health and longevity of that organization for which you work and say, “Maybe we should be doing things differently? Maybe we should do it for the long-term.” The two ten years apart are related but in different ways.
You mentioned Rubies a minute ago, Dan. I know you’ve got a different framework for thinking about the generations than the traditional ones of Millennials, Gen Z and Gen X. Talk a little bit about rivers and rocks and rubies.
What has happened forever basically, since maybe 1964, is that we have coined individuals in the organization and outside of it by these 14 to 18 year segments. To your point, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y/Millennials, Gen Z and now Gen Alphas. How is that helpful, first of all, inside an organization who’s trying to be innovative, serve customers, and create a great employee experience? What it basically does is it takes societies tropes and means and places them inside the organization. It just compounds ageism
Whether that is ageism or directed at young people, or middle-aged sandwich workers, as I call them, who have to take care of ailing or dementia-based parents and the young kids at their raising. Maybe older workers who are just dealing with the fact that they’re getting older but still at work. Generations enforce ageism. If we were to just take a look at this and say, “You and I are both props of the same vintage.” Everyone will go through three career eras. As opposed to generations, all of us, regardless of your age and when you were born, go through three eras. I called them rivers, rocks, and rubies.
I’m paying homage to basically some early work with a psychologist, LaMotte. Basically, we have two types of intelligence. We have what’s called fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid is when you start and then that fluidity eventually morphs into crystallized intelligence. I was like, “Not quite.” That’s not what I see in my role as a people in culture executive for 30 years. I’ve seen three eras or three types of intelligence. Essentially, fluid intelligence or what I call the rivers, that’s when you’re just getting going.
Again, you could be 16 to 30 or 16 or 34. It doesn’t matter. The number doesn’t matter. You’re in your young era, but then you start to figure out things. In that same river, you start dropping what I call rocks. You solidify a little bit. Your river is still flowing around you. You’re still fluid, but you have now ideas on how and what works right in the right way because you get context. You develop that and more wisdom. As the river continues to undulate around your rocks, those rocks get polished and they crystallize over time to become rubies.
You, I, all of us, start as a river, become a rock and then eventually become this ruby. Again, you don’t have to use the vernacular but if you were to just say, “All our organizations and all our team members, regardless of whether they’re born in 1946 or 2026, it doesn’t matter. There’s these three eras and it happens. How might we look at intergenerational teams made up of rivers, rocks and rubies? How might we look at rivers as ways in which we help them become rocks? How may we look at the rubies and say, “The rubies are shining. We should keep a bunch of those shiny objects around so that we can help rocks and rivers become better employees.” That’s the type of frame I’d love to see.
What’s interesting about the whole generational labeling and stereotyping is, it’s fun but it’s also rife with accuracy. You are highlighting a lot of times. Somebody our age, we would have been rivers back in the day, trying to figure out what we wanted to do. Meandering through and ultimately figuring out a path that felt right for us, betting down and becoming one of those rocks. We look at those kids, they’re kids because they’re even younger than my kids are at the point, in their early twenties and think, “They’re different from the way that we were.”
They’re clearly different in the sense that they’re digital natives and we weren’t. There are definitely some things that will affect their adult lives relative to what has affected our adult lives. We blend so much of this stuff. The context of what’s going on in the world while you are coming of age. What is relevant to you in your twenties relative to what’s relevant to you in your 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s. The fact that they are somewhat different from what you and I were like when we were in our early twenties.
The problem is, when you start unpacking all of that, these differences aren’t nearly as big as we make them out to be. They become an excuse, a label, and a stereotype. They get in the way of people figuring out what’s the best way to work with everybody as individuals. To me, that’s the part about the generational labels that’s just flawed.
When you treat senior team members as a cost to cut, decades of institutional wisdom walk out the door. It's a critical error. Share on XMy dad was born in England during just the end of World War II. He grew up in an era whereby he put to work at sixteen. He was in an apprenticeship program. He was an Engineer, but they never had TV. They couldn’t afford a TV. Their entertainment was out and about in the community in England where he lived, but the radio. His stories at work were about radios. When he enters his rock era with other rivers who now are in technicolor, can have TV and its color. Now, these conversations are happening like, “Interesting. I never thought about TV that way.”
My point is, wherever you are, we all have tool change. Whether it’s from the radio, to the TV, to the internet, to AI. These tools change. Why is it that we can’t evolve our thinking to say, “Even though I might be a ruby, can I learn AI?” Of course. This is not the point. Can a river learn about the Beatles and the Stones now? Sure. I think they can.
You can go pick up some catalog of music and say, “That’s pretty cool music from the ‘60s and ‘70s. That’s the thing. We myopically consider and classify people based on an era where they were born. In my case, between `years of 1964 and 1980 being Gen X. Does that mean that I am not able to enjoy Wet Leg, Will Fallas or Wolf Parade or Harry Styles these days because of their river bands? No. The same thing can apply at work and that’s what I’m trying to get.
You talk about the title of the book, The Future of Work Is Grey, and there’s an implicit focus on the aging population and what’s happening with them. There’s a lot of ageism of mid-level people, middle managers, and others who are in their 30s and 40s. It feels like they’re under attack. We’re trying to thin out management layers and get rid of management numbers in a more general sense. The people who are left end up with 10 or 12 or 15 people reporting to them, who they can give no time to. What do you see happening with that population?
They’re the highest, on a percentage basis, increase in stress and anxiety as a cohort inside of our organizations. In the rock era, some of them are dealing with aging parents and young kids or kids, giving the birth rate to collapse. Nonetheless, having to do it to your point expands in layer increase. Not only is there the hollowing out of middle management. It’s like putting more on them. You’d have 8 to 12 direct reports in this span and layers thing. They’re being over six layers between the CEO and that frontline team member.
These days, the minimum it seems is that team size starts at 16 and then goes up to 50. To your credit, how are you supposed to have great coaching conversations, performance management, just normal development and being a leader and a manager at same time with a team of 50? These are consequential decisions that are being made. That is adding stress and anxiety on this middle cohort. What happens? Not only do you have that stress and anxiety going up. Performance issues will ensue, and then they start looking for other roles.
It’s like, “Can I possibly work for our company or organization that is pro midlife knowing that I am this sandwich generation leader and all these things going on?” What happens is you start having a talent exodus. That is another thing that could be thought through when you look at these three river, rock and ruby eras and say, “If we hollow out our rocks, who’s going to become our rubies one day?” It’s some short-sighted thinking there.
Have you worked with an organization and gotten them thinking in this rivers, rocks, and rubies construct? If so, what changes you see them making to make it better?
No organization specifically yet, because I’ve been immersed in the development of the body of work. In the research and the interviewing and then the working with organizations on pieces to the puzzle I was trying to put together, there are lots of good lights of hope around the world. An example are companies like L’Oreal and British Columbia Lottery Corps, in my home province in Canada here in BC. They have instituted phase retirement programs. Instead of you ducking out off a cliff at the age of 65, they ask you if you like to phase that out over 3, 4 or 5 years and maybe go from 100% to 80% to 60% to 50% time.
We’d love that. We’d love to support you. We get to use you still for that period of time over those 3, 4, and 5 years. How fantastic is that? We’d love to keep you around, learn from you and help you onboard your replacement or whatever the case may be. Those types of programs are pretty good. Unilever has another program, which is neat. It’s called Uwork. What they do is they allow you, whether you’re a river, rock or ruby.
They’re thinking about the longer-term play for their talent composition. Your work allows you to basically have a side hustle. As long as you’re not in competition with Unilever, you can start your own gig. You can work for another gig up to a percentage basis or a number of hours per week and as long as you’re doing your job. As long as you fit that in somehow, they promote it. You will have these new learnings and new opportunities then potentially also bring back into Unilever. There’s lots of good examples. It’s just that there’s no big, massive one, “We’ve become pro age and we’re going to do everything as I’m recommending.”
One of your other terms is experience dividend. What does that mean? What does it look like in a real company?
First of all, the book I wrote is like an album, side A and side B. Side A is the problem. Those are the problem tracks. That’s the age debt. If you flip the album over or get to side B on the book, the experience dividend, essentially. You can turn debt into a dividend if you erase your thinking, at least evolve it. The three good examples that are nucleus points, I call them as follows. One is the longevity lens. The second is the wisdom wheel. The third is the career canvas.
When I’m asking the leader to consider, whether you’re a small, medium-sized business, or you’re a unit leader or maybe you’re a big company or public sector. It doesn’t matter. The longevity lands are basically you say, “How are we going to be more age inclusive in our culture?” It’s our job descriptions. The fact that people are living longer and having open conversations about that. The fact that those rocks and some ruby women, 52% of them suffer from perimenopause, premenopausal and menopause. What are we doing about that and so on?
It’s just like these longevity items that we never talked about. If we were to become more age inclusive and pro age, maybe we should. That’s number one. Number two, on the wisdom wheel. Going back in time a little bit and saying, “Might we allow apprenticeships? How can someone shadow someone?” We learned from them. How do we make sure we don’t terminate rubies by not capturing their wisdom, and then sharing that?
There’s a great example of AI. Why not have a whole bunch of cameras or contraptions? Whereby, we are capturing the knowledge of people. Using AI not only to capture, but then to put that into nuggets of learning so people could learn from customer relationships that people have but never talked about. How you run the line and that production line and again, share that. Wisdom, mentoring, coaching, rotations, etc.
The career canvas is my point of taking a very large match in setting the career ladder on fire. This is where small, medium-sized businesses do this because they’re told to by edict, I suppose, from past lore. Large organizations still do this. The only way is up. A terrible song, but that’s not the way our career should go either. They should be multifaceted, multidirectional. What’s wrong with a 48 year old taking a two-year down spin and saying, “I don’t want to be the Director for a while. I’m going to be an individual contributor. Is that cool?” Why not?
Is there a stigma? We call it demotion? Why do we call it demotion? That’s terrible. You’re just taking a break but you’re still a full-time employee. You just don’t want to run a team anymore. That organization shouldn’t lose you if you want to do something different for a while. That’s what I’m getting at. The canvas is, you and the team or the organization, rethinking about every career goes up. In fact, it could be multidirectional and like a good painter, you have all these paint colors and brushes. How might we basically paint a better picture using the canvas of opportunity?
So much of this just strikes me as you’re talking about this, Dan. HR people and cultural organizations are so pressed for time. They’re besieged. They’re getting pressured to halo themselves out and use AI across everything. They don’t have time to think about this. An enlightened manager, if somebody 48 years old came to them and said, “I want to downshift for a couple of years because I’ve got something going on and my personal life and I’d like to go back to doing what I was doing.”
An enlightened manager, an enlightened HR person, an enlightened organization, you put all those things together, and that might happen. The odds of each of those things being in place, is certainly well less than 100%. Multiply them all together and you get something probably approaching zero. That’s why this doesn’t happen so much. It’s because it requires work and it’s so antithetical to the way that people tend to think about the career ladder and the idea that if you step down, it’s permanent. You can’t come back to what you were doing.
I do love the word antithetical. This type of thinking is anathema to the longer term rethinking that any organization of any size needs to be doing. Again, if I were to chat with you in ten years time and we say, “In 2026, Dan, you said demographic disruption is an inevitability. The math math’s on this one. Ten years later, in 2036, how did those organizations do?” The good ones will be making the plans and preparations now to do exactly what you said to carve out time in calendars to say, “What will this organization be like in 5 years or 10 years?” If you’re not a leader who suggests to everyone, “We got to invest a little time on this,” then that conversation you and I will have ten years from now. We’ll be talking about a lot of broken organizations and people.
Career ladders are broken. A flexible career canvas lets professionals downshift, try new roles, and stay engaged for the long run. Share on XThere’s so much disruption going on now. I haven’t felt this way since the internet era was blossoming many years ago in terms of what’s going on with AI. I feel like the broader geopolitical sense and how people are thinking about those forces and their careers. It feels like the next ten years are going to be interesting. It’s hard to know how any of its going to play out.
I don’t disagree. The only way I would disagree with it is that we’re running out of people. If we’re running the people, that tells me there’s a supply and demand scenario that is unfolding that we might want to pay attention to.
Apart from the fact that we’ve got the supply demand inequity that you’re talking about. You also make an argument that thinking about this more creatively helps with innovation. Not just filling seats but also with doing better work, driving work, innovation and growth. How so?
If I told you that in Japan, adult diapers outsell baby diapers. It might be a bit of a shock for those that haven’t heard that before and it’s true. South Korea is the same thing, by the way. The diaper manufacturers, when they started looking at the demographics, they’re like, “Maybe we should start thinking about what that consumer pool looks like. If it’s shifting demographically, maybe we should shift with the times.” There’s a hidden point in this book.
The book is called, The Future of Work Is Grey. Grey is meant to be a double entendre, which is that we are aging as society but also, there’s fog. Grey can mean fog. What I’m trying to do with the fog is to lift it and then when you lift that fog, what should there be is, hope for an opportunity. Which is why the cover is Gold. I think the future of work is a golden opportunity. Whether you’re looking at that from what consumer opportunities, what business opportunities, and what B2B opportunities are there as society ages. You’re like, “We can put our heads together here and maybe think about different ways in which to help.”
This isn’t just like, “We need more elder care homes and health care options.” We do, but that’s not the end of our innovation that we should be thinking about. If you get intergenerational, rivers, rocks and rubies, thinking creatively about what we might do economically from a production, innovation, output perspective. Maybe you come up with your own adult diaper strategy, and maybe there’s something else metaphorically there that helps you for the long term.
It’s hard to do a follow-up question when we’ve been talking about adult diapers and baby diapers, but I’m going to do my best. For an organization that’s thinking about this, somebody picks up your book, reads it and is thought-provoking to them. What do you want them to start doing, stop doing and continue doing?
It’s not in the right order in the book because I wrote it in a way that just said, “You can pick up any track whenever you want,” because I don’t even call them chapters. I do think that if I were to pin the tail on the proverbial age donkey, ageism is the one that is the immediate remedy opportunity and what’s happening. You see on one end, older rubies, even rocks scrubbing their tenure from LinkedIn. They’re embarrassed or finding that they’re not getting through to the recruiters or talent teams or even hiring managers. They might have worked for six years between 1995 and 2001. That’s dated on their LinkedIn.
There’s this, how old is your inferiority complex that has enveloped the Western world? As if we’re not supposed to say our age. As if I am looking into this camera, it isn’t 55. I’m supposed to be 38. That is ageism but that’s self-ageism. Meaning I am embarrassed by the inevitability that I am aging. We all age. That needs to be self-corrected but then, you’ve got the age against the machine, as I call it, issue. That’s the organization.
Whether that’s talent teams, hiring teams, or HR teams who use ATS and are consciously looking for age and to scrub those people out from the potentiality of being hired or getting to the interview stage. That’s wrong. That’s ageism. Ageism is how you craft your job descriptions. Ageism is how you craft who gets considered for promotion or the projects inside your organization.
Ageism is how you communicate in the town halls by recognizing only the rivers or vice versa, never recognizing the rivers. All of this has an opportunity. If we just looked in the mirror and said, “We all end up six feet under. Age is inevitable. What is it that we’re doing to be more inclusive rather than age negative and ageist?” I think that’s the opportunity.
If people start working well into their 60s or their 70s and maybe even into their 80s. What do you think’s going to change most about the way that the workplace works?
There’s going to be all some practical changes. Westpac is a bank in Australia who took a look at their workforce. They got 33,000 people or so. They recognize that just 22% of the workforce was over the age of 55. They’re like, “That’s like 7,000-ish people. Maybe we could do some ergonomic accommodations for whether they’re bank tellers or things that’s happening within their actual branches and so forth.” They made a conscious decision to be pro age, age inclusive and then look at things ergonomically.
When I was visiting a couple car manufacturer plants in Japan, they too have done the same thing on the lines. Both with the use of AI and VR headsets and the way in which the lines are crafted to be more pro age for potential physical labor work as these examples I’m giving you. It can be done in a way that’s a little bit more healthy. You got that, the physical, ergonomic, easy, low hanging fruit stuff.
Does anyone out there think that they’re training people to understand their unconscious and conscious bias of age? Do we have age training or ageism of training? Are we a pro age company by talking a good game and putting up posters of people of three different eras but not teaching people how and what they’re doing from a biased perspective and enlightening them? That, to me, is a conversation at a leadership level. Your line leader or you as a team lead could be having it and good on you if you are. It is a conscious culture change opportunity that the C-suite and the senior leaders need to be having.
Ageism isn't just an organizational problem; it's a self-inflicted one when we scrub our past experience from our resumés. Share on XYou wrote this book because you saw a gap in the way that people were thinking about this. Having now gone down the rabbit hole of looking at this very deeply, where are you in terms of optimism, pessimism about where organizations are and what the future holds for us?
I’ve been an executive at Telus and SAP for about eighteen years, running culture, leadership development, all the CLO capacities and I never thought about age. Not once. If I consider myself semi-smart with a bunch of degrees, running culture change in the development of leaders and teams for two organizations over nearly two decades and I never once thought about it. I’m trying to perhaps remedy a little bit of my own past mistakes and to enlighten others that certainly I would argue aren’t thinking about it either.
Now that the book is out in the world, the conversation will blossom because people will be able to pick it up and start talking about it more. I appreciate you taking time, especially given that this is launch week talk with me. Thank you, Dan.
It’s been great to chat with you, JR. Thanks to the opportunity. I appreciate the new friendship.
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What I would like you to take away from the discussion with Dan, first is this idea that age is real. In most of the developed world, we have fewer people coming into the workforce than we do leaving the workforce. It’s going to compound just given what’s going on with population trends. The idea of age debt reflects this demographic change as something that organizations and leaders are ignoring. The cost is starting to show up in talent gaps, disengagement and lost knowledge. That’s what is providing the spark for Dan writing this book in the first place.
Second, we talked about generational labels and how we often use them as a crutch and not a strategy. This idea of rivers, rocks and rubies rather than Gen X, Y, and Z. The way we talk about this isn’t just semantic. We need to rethink how we design teams, careers, and leadership to reflect the fact that we have a multi-generational workforce and that we’ve got to create something which sustains itself over time and gets the best out of all those populations. Also, recognizes the life constraints that they’re operating in and what they need from their professional lives at that point in their lives.
Third is, this idea of the experience dividend. Flipping on its head the idea that experience is costly, older and unproductive workers. Start to think about how we get as much out of these people as possible and take advantage of them. Potentially, an alternate labor model from the traditional idea of a full-time person who steadily rises up the corporate ladder. This idea of getting more out of these people will be especially critical as we are relying more and more on experience. Especially when we’re hollowing out junior roles with AI.
Finally, it’s this idea that we’ve got to think differently about age in the workforce. The companies that are going to be successful, probably aren’t going to be the ones that are the youngest or the ones that are the most disruptive. They’re going to be the ones over the long term that integrate talent across ages, skills and perspectives.
That’s going to require redesigning careers, rethinking leadership and letting go of some outdated assumptions about how long and how linearly people work. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube and others. If you found this discussion enlightening and I hope you did, please sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.
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