My current job as a Data Manager (Maternity Cover) at the well known independent King Edward VI School in Southampton finishes at the end of this term in early July. In preparation for that event I have been searching for a new position.
Now I know that times are tough and that jobs are difficult to get whatever your age, but that is not really my concern. I want to work and even the government is trying to encourage people to work past 65 so that the huge cost of providing state pensions is reduced. I for one have no problem with that idea, after all … if I can continue working at something that I enjoy and at the same time continue to bring an income into the home, then why not?
Of course, if I had a nice fat private pension then I could stop working and enjoy myself even more. Sadly that is not so in my case and many others are also discovering that their pensions are not quite as ‘fat’ as they had hoped!
Yes, I will have a small pension plus the state pension at 65, but that amounts to barely enough to exist on. What is worse … I will have much more time on my hands with a lot less money to spend on filling those hours.
Now please do not shout at me, I’m not blaming anyone other than myself. My point is that I really do want to keep on working … but there is just nothing available and where there is, there are plenty of younger and more paper qualified people than me. Many advertised jobs I could do easily - but they demand a degree or some other qualification, a number of years experience, are only part time or pay unfair low wages.
Experience seems not to count for much anymore.
I have a wealth of business experience, business development, IT and people skills. I’ve even run my own businesses, some with a good level of success and others … well not so good perhaps!
Once upon a time I was top of my profession as a software developer. Today that technology has long gone and the new technologies are very complex and almost exclusively done by the younger generation who received quality teaching and guidance in their chosen areas. I learnt my skills by reading the software manufacture’s manuals … there were no training courses as software development was so very new back then.
The point is this - as my life moved forward my work became more generalised. I moved from being a software developer to being a manager, then to being a company director. The roles became much wider and less specialised, the earnings rose exponentially as the responsibilities increased. This is a quite normal pattern of things for people who have been working during the last 30 to 40 years or so.
Of course if you do these things within some large corporate business then you are likely to end up nearer the top with a great income and an amazing pension plan. But, if like so many of us you do this yourself, running a small business, struggling from one month to the next then it is often very different. Yes we have our freedom; we have the right to make our own decisions but often we operate within our own limited knowledge and make the wrong decisions as a result.
Today’s young people are much more likely to be professionally trained and keep working with the skill sets they were trained in and continued to develop over the years. Companies are bigger, structures much stronger and individual careers planned and developed to a much higher degree.
I’m not scared of taking any job that I can do, even if it only pays the minimum wage, but what does that do to my self esteem. What happened to all those dreams of success … those desires that we all secretly have, to own that special car and country home, or having our own business and financial independence.
As we get older we also have the issues of declining health, the added restrictions that age brings, the powerlessness to carry out heavy work, failing eye sight and hearing and the general decline of our bodies.
These frustrations are not made any easier when we are also hounded by the inability to find work that we are able to do; we would enjoy doing and that pays a reasonable wage.
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1 comment:
You have given me good reasons not to try to move into management. As an IT contractor I learn new technologies as a matter of course and I am about the same age as you. Of course when you become a manager your tech skills begin to evaporate.
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