How Older Candidates Can Make

When you're an older person looking for a job, it's hard to get past the secret fear of many employers that you are going to cost too much. So how can you suggest that you won't?

Check out the ammunition in a new study done by consulting firm Towers Perrin for AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons. While it's hardly a disinterested report, given AARP's mission to promote the interests of older people, you'll find some handy (and compelling) arguments that older workers can be cost-effective.

"We've heard for a long time that older workers cost more, they don't have technological skills, they're inflexible," says Deborah Russell, director of work force issues at AARP. Those are "old-fashioned myths. There is a business case to be made for looking at 50-plus workers as part of your labor-force strategy." (If you want to read the full study, visit www.aarp.org/research/work/employment/workers_fifty_plus.html.)

Older workers often do cost their companies more in employer-paid medical services, according to the report.

For instance, companies paid an annual average of $7,622 in medical claims, from hospital bills to prescription charges, for workers age 60 to 64 (including their dependents), compared with $4,130 for workers 40 to 44 and $3,206 for workers 30 to 34, based on claims data in 2003 covering 7.5 million medical-plan participants.

More Motivated
But older workers offset those higher costs by being among the most motivated employees, according to a Towers Perrin survey of 35,000 workers at large companies.

Highly motivated workers are those who say they're "extremely likely" to be able to, among other things, satisfy customers, affect product quality and control business costs.

For workers of all ages, the average "motivation score," on a scale of 0 to 100, is 74.8. Among workers 55 and older, the average motivation score is 78.4. Among those 18 to 29, the score is 71.2.

"What was surprising, and may be contrary to conventional wisdom, is that the motivation level...actually got higher for the older workers," says Roselyn Feinsod, co-author of the study and a principal at Towers Perrin in Stamford, Conn. A high score on the motivation index indicates workers who are "more inclined to serve customers better."

Why should employers care? Companies with highly engaged workers perform better on average than their competitors on some financial measures, according to the study's look at 2003 data.

For instance, firms with motivated workers are likelier to exceed their industry-average revenue growth over a one-year period.

And Towers Perrin found an inverse relationship between motivated workers and the cost-of-goods-sold yardstick: At companies with a high percentage of motivated workers, the cost of goods sold was below average for that industry. And disengaged workers tended to work at companies with a higher-than-average cost of goods sold.

Perhaps because of their higher motivation, older workers are less likely to leave their jobs, which in turn reduces turnover expenses. "The incremental cost of health care can be more than offset by the benefit of avoiding the cost of turnover," Ms. Feinsod says.

Innovators at Any Age
Another common belief is that older workers are less likely to be innovators. This, too, may be a misperception.

"There's a very funny preconception in our society...that innovation is the domain of youth," says David Galenson, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and author of "Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity." But "some great innovators are young, some are old," he says.

Mr. Galenson says there are two main types of creativity, one based on breaking the rules and the other based on building on what's already been learned.

Individuals of the first type are "very iconoclastic," Mr. Galenson says. "They learn the rules of a new discipline and they say 'I don't like that rule.'" Think Picasso and James Joyce.

The other type will "get better as they get older...They're collecting information. They're learning more about the world and getting better about using that information," he says.

Some companies may be "looking for these young conceptual guys to make these big leaps forward," Mr. Galenson says. But if they need a business plan, they might need people "who've been around the block. Companies, by and large, need both kinds of people."

Then, there's the belief that older workers are less likely to learn new tasks. Some say this doesn't hold water, either.

"A popular bias is you can't teach old dogs new tricks," says Neil Charness, a psychology professor at Florida State University and an associate of the school's Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy. "It ain't necessarily so," he says. "One thing managers and others have to get over is some of their...false beliefs about the ability of older workers to learn and to benefit from training."

http://www.careerjournal.com/myc/fifty/20060202-coombes.html