Your “Career Age” Matters More Than Your Actual Age
Every week, I field a call from someone who mentions age discrimination as a factor at work in their career search. Typically, the comment comes with a sigh and a shrug of “what can you do?” since, in their mind, they’re feeling helpless to do anything that will garner them a fair shot as an older candidate.
Part of that’s true, of course. While we wait for age-magician David Sinclair and the other countless folks working in AgeTech to slow or reverse the toll of aging, we can’t do anything about our Actual Age, in years. We become quite adept at scrolling down, down, down on websites to find and select our chronological birth years.
Companies have earned their bad rap for good reason. Over about a 20 year period, close to half a million workers filed age discrimination claims and many of them will have a winnable case. Many companies won’t hire or promote older candidates because they worry that the person will be too stuck in their ways, will want too high of a salary, will try to take more authority than the boss is willing to grant, will cost more in benefits and will jump out of the company the second they find a job that’s a more senior level role. Older workers can go hoarse defending themselves on all of these points, but often, hiring teams double down on their discrimination.
But whether you were born in ‘59 or ‘95, there’s one thing you have the power to proactively define every day, sort of a magic eraser for these worries:
Your Career Age.
By Career Age, I mean whether or not peers see you as a perpetually-evolving, curious, wise, nimble innovator, or a reliable but non-innovative, has-a-hammer-must-be-a-nail, career coaster looking for paid benefits until retirement. Or somewhere in between, of course.
When you interview for a job, or go for a promotion, what you’re really trading on is your Career Age, which may or may not be the same as the number of candles on this year’s cake.
I once interviewed a C-level candidate who was more than capable of doing the job at hand, but wasn’t inspiring or cutting edge in his thinking. Immediately after the day’s panel of interviews, the CEO blasted into my office and said, “No way; he’s too old.” Of course, I responded with how it’s not fair, or legal, to talk about people that way, but no matter what I said, he was resolute that he didn’t want this guy on his team.
But then a surprising thing happened: We ended up hiring someone 15 years older than that candidate, supported by an enthusiastic thumbs-up from that same CEO. That second person went on to lead a massive transformation not just of our systems but also our entire business model, eventually leaving to drive digital transformation elsewhere.
I’ve seen this over, and over, and over again, that some (not all) people who think they’re being discriminated against because of age may be communicating all wrong in crucial career conversations.
What did that second person do that shaped his perceived Career Age?
He interviewed with a point of view about what digital transformation needed to look like
He had done the work of staying not just current, but ahead of the curve of digital adoption
He could relate to employees at all levels with humor, mindfulness and presence
He brought data into any conversations he could
He learned from people around him who were younger than he was, and routinely pulled together a diverse group of employees to inform his strategy
He had passion and enthusiasm for the mission of the team and was clearly able to communicate it across the organization (including during his interviews)
He seemed hungry for change and ready to be a change agent
I’m sure you can think of someone like this in your own network - someone who seems both fresh and ageless at the same time. And it’s not just people looking to seem younger; the reverse is equally true. I’m sure you can think of young professionals who are wiser and sharper than their years could possibly justify, but there they are, leading skillfully with a Career Age that belies their barely-off-parental-health-insurance status.
Of course a good question is: Is there one “right” Career Age? I think it depends on the role. You’d want to know, generally speaking, the data about the age group of the people who are currently applying for the job you think should be yours.
Let’s say you’re 22 years old and you think you want to be a manager. You’re likely competing against people in their later 20s - 40s. In your case, you’d be trying to bring your Career Age UP, by learning about management, strategy, goal-setting, and delivering performance feedback, as well as more strategic themes in your field. If you’re 60 and you want to be a technical program manager, your “competition” will likely be folks with native digital fluency and a finger on the pulse of emerging themes and technologies. By staying current with that age cohort, you’ll have many more career opportunities.
Here are some defining topics to determine if your Career Age gives you an advantage or could be holding you back:
I spend more time than most people researching emerging ideas in my field
I understand and can evolve the tech stack that drives excellence in the work I do
I have a network of people who think of me as an innovator
I introduce multiple new ideas regularly at my current job to transform how we operate
I attend conferences, meet-ups, and other events with industry thought leaders to hear about new problems and new approaches
I build relationships with people who have careers similar to the one I’d like, as well as people who have both more and less experience than I do
I take responsibility for my own career skill-building, training and development and I don’t rely on my employer to deliver it
In every career conversation we hold, whether it’s with a hiring team, boss, partner, client, future employee or peer, we don’t “act our age”: We really act our Career Age. Perhaps we collectively define a measurement someday of Career Readiness, or Career Resilience, so that we don’t need to think about age at all. Perhaps companies stop discriminating and start embracing what each individual brings to the table, rather than making quick judgments about age (or other factors.)
For the moment, however, by taking charge of our career and focusing it on themes of innovation, emerging needs, future themes, and mission/values, we can turn our Career Age into a secret advantage in any job-related conversation.