We’re setting ourselves–and the country–up by relegating anyone over 60 to the “discard pile.”  How long are we going to keep doing this same dumb thing?

Why are we setting these people adrift instead of using what they know and what they are good at?  As the bulge that is the baby boom moves into the “retirement” phase of life, the cost of this folly will skyrocket.  Is that what we want our grandkids paying for?

The current assumption is that as you age, you become inept, but research doesn’t support that. Seventy percent of what we blame on aging is the result of lousy lifestyle choices.

The prevailing wisdom is that those who can afford to want to retire.  But in a 2005 study of over 3000 baby boomers, the Merrill Lynch Foundation found that only 17% wanted that lifestyle.

Every time we “retire” someone, we lose their expertise.  Younger workers could be a lot better at what they do a lot faster if the “old pros” were serving as mentors.   We lose their understanding of the context in which the work got done–and the resulting problem-solving, negotiating, and customer support advantages.   We lose a ton of information about what works and what doesn’t across the spectrum of the jobs they were doing.

The system we have in place, assumes our most experienced, skilled workers want and need to “disappear”  at a specific age.  We pay them to do so.   What’s the benefit of that?

Even worse, the consequences  of not having a purpose in life are dire. People who have a reason to get up in the morning stay a lot healthier and live longer.  It’s a double whammy for the country–first we pay them not to work and then we pay for healthcare they may not have even needed if they were working.

Worst of all though, we are each setting ourselves up for this same frustrating decline into perceived uselessness by letting the system continue as is.

There a few things we need to accept:

• Every person in society deserves a purpose and needs to be encouraged to claim it.
• Not all important jobs are full time.  Some aren’t even paid.
• “Old” is not a disease.   Wrinkles don’t erase competence.
• Things don’t improve by having capable people sitting around doing nothing.

The idea that youth and progress are the only things that have value  has been around since the Second Great Awakening that began around 1825.  It’s time to let go of this outdated thinking and grab onto something more innovative. The challenge is not in chosing between young and old. The true test of our mettle as a nation and as individuals is in becoming a culture that values–and uses–both the freshness of its youth and the wisdom of its elders.

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Mary Lloyd is CEO of Mining Silver LLC, a company dedicated to using the potential of those over 50 better. She’s author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, visit her website.

Staying employed is as much about attitude as talent.

Virtually all of us have been affected by the current unemployment situation. If we haven’t personally lost a job, taken a pay cut, or ended up on reduced hours, we have friends and family members who are dealing with any and all of that. Keeping a job has become a far more serious concern of late. Be sure you aren’t setting yourself up with your attitude.  Here are three things to think about:

Are you excusing yourself from doing the work?  Yes, all this doom and gloom is demoralizing, but that doesn’t give you a free pass.  The longer you are in a job, the easier it is to tell yourself “I’ve done this a long time, I deserve to throttle back a little.”   You don’t have to go full bore all the time, but you do have to do the work. 

One of the most frustrating comments I hear from employers about older workers is that “they don’t want to work.”  We’re talking real estate professionals and scientists with graduate degrees here–at least in terms of where I’ve heard the comments.  Deciding that you’ve earned the right to slow down is okay of you take less pay to slow down.  But if you are still holding the same job and claiming the same salary, that “right” you think you deserve could land you in the unemployment line.

Are you part of the solution?  It makes no difference if you are eighteen or eighty, you have things to offer that can help the company thrive.  The probability that those talents have become highly polished skills increases with experience.  Use yours with intelligence, grace, and collaboration.

This is not a case of insisting that the old ways are better.  This is a commitment to dealing with the current challenges well by bringing everything you can to bear.  In particular, learn to build alliances with those who understand what you don’t.  Together, the difference you can make will be huge.

Are you gobbling benefits?   Just because the company offers health insurance doesn’t mean you need to head for the doctor’s office every time you get a cold.  Many of us have gotten far too accustomed to solving our problems with pills.  The resulting skyrocketing health insurance costs has become a horrendous burden to most employers.  This is big piece of why ”older workers are more expensive.”  Keep yourself healthy instead of expecting doctors to do it for you.  (They can’t anyway.  They just figure out why you are sick–sometimes.)

The same is true for taking more than you really need as sick days.  It’s wiser to stay home if you have something communicable, but taking a sick day to coach a baseball game is neither honest or smart if you want to keep the job.

For those of you grumbling about how miserable your job is, here’s one last bit of advice.  If you don’t want it, someone else would be ecstatic to have it.   Suck it up, turn on your smile and do the very best job you can.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and CEO of Mining Silver, a company focused on using the talent of those over 50 more effectively.  She’s the author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Contact her at mary@mining-silver.com.

Some resume advice given to those of us over 50 is misguided-and wrong.

At an AARP job fair I volunteered at yesterday, several job seekers told me stories of situations where they had ideal qualifications for work they were applying for, but they didn’t include it, because it was more than ten years ago.    They were under the impression that hiring supervisors were death on seeing anything but their most recent experience. 

This is ridiculous.  The strongest thing someone over 50 has to offer an employer is the breadth and depth of their experience.  It means they know how to show up for work on time, solve a problem without creating a new one, soothe an irate customer, and so on.  Negating that by limiting what you can talk about to the last ten years is lunacy.

This suggested strategy is probably stemming from a misunderstanding of advice that you include only the last ten years of experience on your resume to reduce the chances of ageism.    There is some legitimacy to that.  But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mention relevant experience  at all.  It just means you don’t need to list every job you ever had.  (Remember when we didn’t have experience and we were desperate to list anything that looked like a job?)

If you are looking for work and have been in the workforce for a while, you need to be both creative and attentive in what you tell a prospective employer about what you can do.  A key piece of a good resume writing strategy is to separate your achievements and strengths from the chronology of your work experience in how your format your information.  That way, you can mention that you successfully owned and operated a car repair shop, even if it was twenty years ago, for example.

The most important thing to do with your resume is to give the person to whom you are sending it a clear idea of your experience at solving the problems they are trying to address.  When you learned that skill isn’t anywhere near as important as that you have it.

Experience is GOOD.  But knowing what part of the vast amount you have applies to the job you’re seeking is critical.  Telling everybody everything won’t work.  But neither does not telling the person who needs to know, simply because you did it more than ten years ago.  Use your head on this and stop  following arbitrary rules that well-meaning but misguided unemployment counselors offer.

**** Mary Lloyd is CEO of Mining Silver and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, visit her website at http://www.mining-silver.com

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

Clips from a business speech:  (about 13 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground)

Mary Lloyd author of Super-Charged Retirement on Vimeo.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

This article originally appeared in the Oct 2009 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newlsetter Put Old on Hold

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This idea that we must focus exclusively on advancement as a career path needs an overhaul.  We sacrifice “out” into a broader life experience and “around” into a more meaningful context when all we worry about is  “up” in our work lives.

A while back I did a presentation about giving older workers a way to keep working on a flexible basis.  That’s important, but it’s only part of the picture.  A wise 40-year old who spoke to me after the speech hammered this home when he said “You need to do something for those of us standing in line who deserve a chance to lead, too.”  He’s right.  This is not  just a case of letting the venerables of the company show up when they feel like it.

“Career” entered the corporate lexicon in the 1960’s.  Since then, the assumed career path is “Work hard, climb the ladder.  Work harder.  Climb higher.  And higher still if you can.  Then retire.”  And fall off the ladder instantly.

The going-up is full of stress and the going-down is WAY too abrupt.   Why do we keep doing it this way?
 
The current economic mess makes us yearn for the up….up….up.  But is a rocket the best analogy for fashioning a career?  It assumes one launch and then a climb into the stratosphere in a steady trajectory to great things–and then oblivion.  We miss so much using this image. Careers can have any shape.  The best is allows you to live the rest of your life at the same time. 

So back to the dilemma of giving retirement-aged workers meaningful opportunities AND young lions the chance to prove themselves as leaders.  We need to do both, but to get to that point, we need to change our sense of career trajectory.  A good career is not just a case of going up and up and up.  It also needs to include a well-thought stage of coming back down.    The way we currently do it is an  ascending straight line with a precipitous fall once we get to retirement. 

An inverted “U” with salary changes in sync with workload would be far more effective.  This would be good for employers who wouldn’t be paying fulltime salaries to people who are starting to throttle back unconsciously.  It would be better for employees since they could stay involved longer abd not deal with the abrupt changes and resulting physical and emotional perils of the traditional version of a career end.

Eventually, companies large and small will use their most experienced people as mentor and coach long term so the company gets the most benefit from their extensive experience.  Then younger leaders shouldering top roles will have access to wise counsel in their decision-making and fatr more extensive resouces for learning what their new roles involve.  At the same time, older workers will know their expertise is valued even as they are paid for fewer hours.

We need to get rid of the idea that throttling back implies a demotion to make this work though.  Cutting back on workload–with a resulting reduction in pay–in late career should be an assumed part of a career path.  If we were REALLY good at this, going to half time when kids are young or to care for a sick loved one would also be accepted practice.   We need to learn to value this kind of flexibility rather seeing it as a flaw or mistake when somone adopts it.

But we’re still fixated on rockets—launch, go into orbit, and stay there.  In reality, careers are more a series of attempts with varied outcomes and additional launches.  Consciously deciding what level we are shooting for each time we launch would be so much smarter.  With a young family or an ailing loved one, we shouldn’t shoot so high.  When we’ve already achieved a lot, moving from leading to giving wise couns–and making room for other things in your life–can be energizing.

A career is more like the space shuttle than the booster rockets that get it into space.  Yeah, there is a big deal launch, and a lot goes into getting ready.  But a shuttle does more than one mission.  It handles the garbage as part of its return duties.  It corrects problems it didn’t create.  And sometimes it gets into dilemmas that weren’t supposed to be part of the mission.  But most to the point, it’s really good at COMING BACK DOWN. 

We need to learn to come back down as part of a career path.  To throttle back as needed so that the rest of life occurs for the entire trip.  We need to launch more than once and when something doesn’t work, launch again without any of the current “failure” mindset. 

The ultimate value of a career is not in the height of the trajectory.  It’s in the quality of the life you lived while you were in it.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Her passion is in capitalizing on the potential of those over 50.  Her website is http://www.mining-silver.com.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

Getting the most out of what you have is definitely in vogue right now. When it comes to how you use your employees to get the work done, it should be on the top of the list all year every year. There’s more to effective use of human resources than just making sure everybody is working on something. If you pay attention to who can do what best, you can mentor, model, and cross pollinate at the same time you are making sure the work gets done.

This is particularly true in terms of the people who’ve been around for a while. As you get used to what people can do, it’s easy to take it for granted and have them keep doing that same thing all by themselves. For years. For decades.

Four bad things can happen when you use that approach:

• New hires who need to learn how to do the job miss the chance to model that effective performance.

• You miss the rest of what that employee is good at because you kept them doing something you already know they were good at.

• Tough job challenges become tougher because you are not applying the most thoroughly seasoned experience in your toolkit to the problem.

• The experienced employee begins to feel “taken for granted” and isn’t motivated to perform at a peak level. Even worse, he or she may elect to leave for to find a more exciting opportunity.

Assigning everyone work exactly the same way is kind of like using a power saw without turning it on. It works a lot better if you see all of what they can do in the role as you assign work. If you have experienced employees and are not using them at least informally as coaches, mentors, and problem solving resources for workers with less experience, you’re literally wasting company payroll dollars.

And do more if you can. Consider redesigning the work so that you can get your experienced workers involved in addressing the tougher challenges more of the time. Get their input on new programs. A lot of what fails has failed before and could have succeeded with a more complete team. In some instances, it will be simple project involvement. But in others, actual job design changes might be warranted. Use that knowledge base and experience as fully as you can.

In a similar vein, it’s easy to assume that older workers are just waiting to retire and don’t want new challenges. And that they will want nothing to do with the company once they can start living “the Golden Years.” Over 70% of the 3000 baby boomers surveyed in 2005 (BEFORE the economic meltdown we are now facing) wanted to be able to work as part of their retirement. But the vast majority favored “cycling in and out of work.” Can you design some of the work that way? You might get it done more effectively if you do.

It may involve getting a retired professional involved on a project from time to time. It may mean enlisting experienced customer service retirees to sign on just for the peak season. It may mean letting an employee who’s a proven self-starter handle a specialized set of responsibilities from the road. I know a guy in Arizona who dispatches trucks for an outfit in Minnesota—from his extra bedroom.

You’ve spent a lot getting these people to the level of experience they currently claim. Just watching them walk out the door is nonsense. Letting them languish in less than challenging tasks when you have problems to solve is equally unenlightened. Explore what might work for them AND the Company. Think hard about just what—of the work they do now–HAS to be shaped they way it currently is. Make the effort to see if you can keep these people doing what they are good at in ways that both get the work done timely and prepare the next generation of workers in those slots as effectively as you can.

We need to change the prevailing yet disastrous assumption that older workers can’t work very well and aren’t interested in excelling. It’s a big fat lie.  But there is truth to the notion that  people perform to level expected of them. When you assume older workers are inept, disinterested and disengaged, they will comply with that expectation.  And you will lose big time in how well you can get the work done.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

As a culture, we are doing an amazingly stupid thing. So with a nod of appreciation to David Letterman here are the Top 10 Reasons to Stop Thinking “Old” is a Problem. His “top ten” lists go from the last to the first so here, in ascending order, are ten reasons to ditch the idea that advancing age means inevitable decline.

10. IT’S NOT FAIR TO ASSUME PEOPLE WHO ARE “OLD” ARE WORN OUT AND USELESS. Or, to put it more bluntly, it’s not legal—at least if you live a developed country. In the United States, denying someone over 40 fair treatment on “any aspect of employment” because of the year he was born might put you on the losing side of a federal lawsuit that involves both compensatory AND punitive damages.

9. AGE = DECLINE IS A LIE. There are no scientific studies that confirm people automatically lose their ability to think and learn as they age. Studies reporting such findings were done on compromised groups who do not represent the general population of this age range.

8. ASSUMING OLDER WORKERS NEED TO “GET OUT OF THE WAY” SO THAT YOUNGER WORKERS CAN HAVE THOSE JOBS IS SHORT-SIGHTED. Isn’t that a bit like expecting Dad to throw the checkers game when you were 10? Asking competent people to step aside so someone else who can’t do the job as well can step up is like throwing away the candy and eating the wrapper.

7. WE NEED THESE WORKERS. Yes, we are currently dealing with the mother of all recessions, but when it ends, this need will be glaring. There are 78 million baby boomers. Gen X, which follows them, only has 40 million. We are going to need some of those 78 million to stick around longer than “average retirement age” to get the same work done, even with the 70 million Gen Y’ers moving into the workforce.

6. WE NEED OLDER WORKERS’ EXPERIENCE. To compete in a global economy, developed nations need to do more than put bodies at machines. We need people with well-developed problem solving skills. Book knowledge helps, but practical knowledge trumps it. Employees who have “been there and done that” know how to avoid the pitfalls and get the job done right—the first time.

5. WE NEED THEIR WISDOM. Come on, folks. There is no way the wunderkind grad from the most prestigious tech mecca is going to get the people parts and contextual stuff right from the get-go. We need both tech savvy and experienced leadership, leading-edge conceptualizing and seasoned veteran decision-making prowess to get this right. When we choose only “new,” we have nothing to anchor it to.

4. THINKING OLD PEOPLE ARE INEPT IS SOOOO NINETEENTH CENTURY. Yes. Nineteenth century. This nonsense of refusing to marry innovation WITH wisdom began in the 1790’s. Employers from then until the 1950’s used the philosophy as justification for requiring workers to retire at a specific age. Brawn was more of an issue then. Thinking that way was wrongheaded in the Industrial Age. But now we’re in the Information Age, where KNOWLEDGE is critical. It’s corporate suicide. In a knowledge-intensive economy, it makes zero sense to send 40 years’ worth of it out the door so you can bring in someone with none.

3. THEY CAN LEAD THE WAY TO WHAT WE ALL WANT. When people old enough to retire choose not to, they pursue work arrangements the rest of us would love to have as well. Let them craft the new shapes for work that would give us all much needed flexibility so we can live the rest of our lives and work, too.

2. AGEIST THINKING IS EXPENSIVE. We want to pretend that if we don’t see them, those millions of older people we’ve marginalized aren’t there. But they ARE there…tapping the healthcare system far more than they would be with meaningful challenges in their lives, collecting Social Security, and relying on society and the government for things they could be doing for themselves given the chance and the encouragement.

1. WE ARE ALL GOING THERE. The weirdest thing about this form of discrimination is that we are all going to live it—short of dying young. But we think of OTHER people getting old and are blind to what we’re setting up for ourselves. Life expectancy right now is about 80. As knowledge workers, we are very likely to beat that. Do we really want to be invisible and irrelevant for twenty or more years of our lives just because some preacher back in 1790 decided youth and progress was better than age and wisdom?

It’s time to git rid of ageism.  It’s wrong, costs money, and sets us all up for a hard time when we get that far.

by Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver

This article appears in the May 2009 issue of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter, Put Old on Hold.

One of the many sad consequences of our preoccupation with youth is that we don’t pay much attention to wisdom. That’s like worrying about what color to paint the garage and ignoring the Ferrari that’s housed inside.

Wisdom, per Merriam Webster’s is “accumulated philosophic or scientific learning: KNOWLEDGE” or “ability to discern inner qualities and relationships: INSIGHT” or “good sense: JUDGMENT.” Roll it all together and you get “a wise attitude, belief, or course of action.” Wisdom is a key to living well. But aspiring to it is not typically on our lists of New Year’s resolutions or personal goal statements.

That’s probably because to acquire it, you have to accept you’re getting older.

First, let’s face one unavoidable fact. Every single day of our lives, we “get older.” It’s the normal course of events. The only alternative is to die—and I’m not voting for that option. So if we’re going to get older anyway, why not do it gracefully? Why not do it in a way that makes the reality more compelling? Why not work on becoming wise?

Going back to the definition I started with, there are three pieces to this—and then the decision to live that way (which is the attitude part).

Knowledge

Jokes about hiring a teenager because they know it all have been around forever. And we’ve all met precocious ten-year-olds who could go on for an hour on a topic they found interesting. But the knowledge that serves as a basis for wisdom has to be more comprehensive than the knowledge of youth. Becoming wise requires an accurate picture of the real world. And that means you need to have lived there a while. And paid attention.

Too often, we live in the realm of what we assume to be true instead confirming what is. Buying a car—or house—that you can’t afford is an example of that. But so is staying in a dead-end job because you’re telling yourself you’re not good enough for anything better. Not believing in ourselves is the stingiest approach of all to life. But it takes wisdom to see that–and to stop doing it.

Gaining knowledge hinges on paying attention to what’s going on around you. People who have learned “what came next” again and again are more serene about life situations. A wise person knows the bad times will end and can work patiently toward that day. She also savors the good times because they, too, are temporary. What we learn of the ebb and flow of life—by living it consciously—gives us a more solid foundation.

Insight

Knowing about life is important, but you need to find the patterns in it, too–even when they’re hidden in the shadows. Insight is combining information from the disparate sources you’ve observed and drawing astute conclusions about what’s going on.

One of my dearest family members reacts intensely to overwork. Until I understood that pattern, I found myself in the middle of emotional upheavals that left me baffled and hurt. Without a conscious assessment of previous episodes and an effort to extract what was common to them, I believed—as she was prone to insisting in those moments—that I was inadequate as a person and a loved one. Now, I just find the quickest route to the sidelines. Getting out of the way for a bit is a much better solution for both of us. This is wisdom. It’s practical. It’s loving. And it’s not going to show up unless you’re getting older. You have to watch things for a while to see patterns.

Judgment

Judgment is not about deciding you’re better than someone else. The judgment that comes with wisdom is about choosing an effective course of action.

Sometimes, it’s obvious. If the house is on fire, you get out and call 911. But if you’ve been worrying for weeks about whether to go on vacation in June or August, maybe you need to let go of it of it for a while. Wise judgment is knowing when NOT to decide sometimes. Ever spend months feeling awful that you weren’t getting to something that “had” to be done only to discover it didn’t need to be done at all?

Wisdom includes intuition when employing judgment. Knowledge and insight are essential, but so is “gut feel” if you want to really get it right. As we get older, we become more willing to hear—and honor—that “little voice.” We make wiser choices as a result.

Wise as an attitude

We don’t become wise instantaneously. Wisdom comes in small increments. But to get all the way to unflappable, ongoing serenity, we need to decide we want to become wiser now. Becoming wise is the best way to grow older. Every day.

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Mary Lloyd is author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. She offers seminars on creating a meaningful retirement and consults to businesses on how to use older talent well. She is available as a speaker. For more on how to get the best out of this stage of life go to => http://www.mining-silver.com.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO. Mining Silver

There’s an old story about a farmer in South Africa who sold his farm so he could become a diamond prospector. He never did find his mother load. But the guy who bought the farm, who was paying more attention to what was going on around him, did—in the creek bed that the would-be prospector had crossed every day he’d owned the farm. If you’re not paying attention, you can miss seeing treasure that you already have.

For many companies and the culture in general, this is true of older workers. They are a gold mine of experience, knowledge, and well-honed skills, yet we politely move them to the sidelines—and then out of the picture entirely and into “retirement” simply because they’ve reached a certain age. Why do we keep doing that?

I can hear the clamor of defense already. Older workers don’t want to work as hard. Older workers want to retire and are just treading water until they can leave. Older workers get sick more often. None of these things are true across the board. What’s even more important to realize is that even if they are true for your company, you may be causing them.

If senior employees aren’t offered new challenges, if their experience isn’t appreciated and relied on, if they aren’t given effective opportunities to learn new technology, you’re stacking the deck against the company—and them. Without positive challenges, appreciation, and a viable chance to learn, it’s hard to enjoy your work no matter how old you are. And when you don’t like your work, you think about leaving, especially if you can retire.

You may be applauding this exodus. It “makes room for fresh blood.” You’re reducing salary and benefits expenses. But that’s like using a gold mine for cold storage. You’re not really getting the best use out of what you have. And when you “throw them away” for younger workers, you lose a lot that the company needs to know.

Why not be smarter about how you use them?

LEVERAGE WHAT OLDER WORKERS KNOW AND CAN DO. The “old pro” who can calm the most irate customer should be the role model for new hires. She might make a great mentor or even a trainer. Even if she doesn’t want those roles, concrete examples of how she handles things make it much easier for younger workers to learn how to do the job right. And she just might perform even better for being noticed.

ADD A SEASONED PERSPECTIVE TO DEVELOPMENT TEAMS. Get your older talent involved with projects that will be enhanced by their viewpoint. What are you trying to do that might run into trouble for lack of a reality check? What needs to be linked carefully to what you are already doing to be a success? Cross-generational teams should be our “secret weapon” for business success. We think of them as battle grounds. Yes, there are generational differences. There always have been. Effective managers—both of companies and projects–capitalize on them.

USE WHAT SENIOR EMPLOYEES KNOW STRATEGICALLY. Too often, we tell older workers how valuable they are and then relegate them to work that doesn’t take advantage of it. This isn’t a matter of “making them feel good.” This is about getting the most bang for your payroll buck. Even so, higher motivation is a usual side effect. And that, in turn, leads to even better performance. From them. From the company.

TEACH TECH IN WAYS NON-GEEKS CAN LEARN. All too often, technical training for older workers is a geek speaking Greek and a jumbled effort to remember stuff that never did make sense. This is not the learner’s fault. This is bad teaching. But older workers are quick to belittle themselves about their inability to learn this stuff. So poorly designed training stays in place and needed skills remain unlearned. If you were teaching your Russian subsidiary how make widgets, would you do it in French?

STOP THINKING “40-HOUR WORKWEEK”. If a senior worker wants to throttle back, explore whether they can get the essential work done on a less-than-fulltime basis. Thinking of full retirement as the only alternative to a fulltime position makes as much sense as thinking the only place you can get to from Chicago is Cleveland. Explore the possibilities. If your company has a defined pension plan especially, include HR. You may create a part-time or project-based slot that gives you more than you would get from a fulltime new hire for less money.

What we are doing with older workers is a senseless waste—to the culture, the company, the person. Grab the competitive advantage by using them to their fullest potential. You will probably be amazed.

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Mary Lloyd is the author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. She offers seminars on how you can create a meaningful retirement for yourself and consults to help your business attract and use retired talent well. She is also available as a speaker. For more insights on how to better use the talent of those in the last third of their lives go to => http://www.mining-silver.com.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO Mining Silver

On his 80th birthday, Hugh Hefner said “80 is the new 40.”   In an article last summer, Sunset magazine proclaimed “100 is the new 70.”   Author and CEO Bill Byham titled a 2007 business book  70: The New 50. The numbers are fun, but so far, it seems in terms of the way we see it as a culture, 50 is still “old.”  We need to revisit that.  We are shooting ourselves in the collective foot big time.

Webster’s lists nine different definitions of the word “old.”  When we talk about “old” people, are we talking about “worn” or “experienced?”   Our continued success as a society hinges on which we choose.  Because 50 is not “worn” so much as polished.   We are throwing away really good stuff–and then paying to keep it somewhere else.

Seventy percent of the physical problems we blame on aging are actually the result of lifestyle choices.  It’s not your age that’s keeping you from doing that bike ride.  It’s that you haven’t walked farther than from the couch to the refrigerator in the last five years.  Excusing our bad habits with our birthdays is a downpayment on a long gloomy death spiral.   Most of us are going to live to 80.  Thirty years of assuming we can’t do what we want because we’re “old” is pretty tragic.

Businesses who assume 50 is “old” are squandering some of their best talent, too.  Instead of helping  the experienced workforce get comfortable with new technology, they look for ways to usher them out the door.  Instead of building multi-generational teams that capitalize on the full range of talents and skills available, they shove the experience in some corner where the younger workers can’t learn from it.  They literally watch needed expertise walk out the door into retirement without ever asking, “Any way we can get you to work for us on a more flexible basis?”

Wired magazine’s April issue includes an article about taking your job on the road–in your RV.  It wasnt written for “old” people.    But it sure looks like a good marriage of “retirement” and staunching the experience drain.  The irony of the current business mindset is that while companies continue to assume that experienced workers want traditional retirement, they are creating flexible work arrangements to attract Gen Y workers as their replacements.  The “new kids” want  to work when they want wherever they want,  responsible only for the end result rather than showing up every day.  It’s called ROWE–results only work environment.    To offer such options to new, inexperienced workers–who probably won’t reach the level of productivity the older workers have for ten years or maybe much longer–and NOT offer it as an alternative to retirement is painfully short-sighted.

As a business, there may also be room to retain the experience you already paid to develop in creative ways that take less than a full time salary to accomplish.   This is a tight labor market, yes.   But it’s also the perfect opportunity to try some things while the pace is a little slower.    How can you marry new technology with old savvy to get the best bang for your labor buck?

And then there is the little matter of government entitlements.  When someone retires, they go on everybody else’s payroll, via FICA taxes.  Social Security comes out of our collective wallets, not “the government’s.”   So when we expect people to be “old” and to retire around 62,  we buy in on taking care of them, in terms of Social Security checks, for an average of about 18 years.

Most  people retire in good health.  They are still capable of doing great work on something in which they believe, particularly if it’s a customized arrangement.  Instead, the invisible wall of ageism goes up around them.  The culture assumes they are washed up, worn out, and useless.   We pay them to “get out of the way” when they weren’t in the way in the first place.  And once they’ve retired, we make re-entry into the labor market, even if highly qualified, damn near impossible.  It’s like we are afraid “old” is contagious.

And it doesn’t stop there.  Once people start being “old,” they buy in on the stereotype.  They need more medical attention.  Much of it wouldn’t be necessary if these capable people could remain engaged.  But when the only person who’ll talk to you is your doctor, you talk to your doctor.  Once Medicare is part of that person’s setup, we are all pay the bill.

We need to revisit when “old” starts.  I’m voting for somewhere around 95 or maybe 98.  Many of us can keep going all the way to the day we die if we just have the opportunity.  People over 50 have a lot left to offer and a lot left to do. As a culture, we need to give them the chance.