Fuller working lives – thank you, but I’ve already had one

Today the government has announced a new strategy under the title Fuller Working Lives for getting older people back into the workplace. “Calling on employers to boost the number of older workers and ensure they are not writing people off once they reach a certain age,” they say. That’s nice of them because everyone my age knows what it’s like to get knocked back when looking for work.

So what is the government actually  going to do to help us?

Barriers to employment? Just ask the over-50s

I read a depressing document this week. PRIME (the people I did a business start-up course with last year) have put out a report called 'The missing million: illuminating the employment challenges of the over 50s'. That 'million' is the number of people over 50 they estimate to have been made ‘involuntarily workless’.

It's good that someone's raising the issue, but as Helen Walmsley-Johnson points out in a Gransnet post, they're not the first and they won't be the last and it's not worth much unless something changes.

Written by a demographic think-tank called the International Longevity Centre, this is the first of three reports looking at 'the economic barriers facing the over 50s'. Don't get me wrong, I am pleased that they are campaigning about this. But I don't think the message is a helpful one.

When did you ever see ‘wisdom’ on a job description?

This time next week I will be unemployed, or workless as our politicians like to say. It’ll be the second time this year I have left a job and both times I was glad to do so. The first time was redundancy after several years in the same place, some good, some bad, so I left with mixed feelings. It felt very much like a divorce. The job I’ve been doing for the last six months was only ever supposed to be temporary. It feels like the rebound relationship that you know all along is not going to last.

Why job interviews are a waste of time (and interviewers are a waste of space)

The stupidest question I was ever asked in a job interview was ‘What do you expect to be doing in five years’ time?’ I know it’s a standard HR-type question. But the interview was for a temporary job.

The weirdest thing said to me in a job interview was ‘We don’t employ people with punk rock haircuts here.’ This was in the early 80s when, like most young women at the time, I had short spiky hair. I should have walked out then but I smiled politely, finished the interview, went home and waited for the rejection letter.

Enterprise, energy and anger

Two months ago I started a course called Preparing to Run Your Own Business. Or, as I like to tell it, ‘I’m doing a business start-up course’. Because start-ups are hip (hey, they’re what young people do), and being trained to be a ‘senior entrepreneur’ is not.

What are you going to do when you grow up?

I blogged a while ago on good things about being over 50.  I recently found another one.

Everyone's heard of the Prince's Trust. Hardly anyone's heard of the Prince's Initiative, aka the Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise aka PRIME. Yes, I think it's one of those things where they chose the acronym first and then worked backwards.

Sometimes only country music will do

Last week, after a difficult period of uncertainty and insomnia, I got confirmation that I am being made redundant. I have mixed feelings: relief, bereavement, trepidation... In fact, it feels very like divorce.

There's only one thing for it. Time to get out the country music.

Dream jobs, work-life balance, and other lies

It was great on Friday to have an extra day off work. I could have spent it in front of the telly watching a celebrity wedding. Or in front of Twitter watching people bitch about the celebrity wedding (I was tempted). Instead I took the chance to catch up on some of the things I don't usually have the time and energy to do. And I thought a bit about my working life.

Everyone knows about the hierarchy of needs, right? The idea is that basic needs come first - stuff like food, sleep and sex. Then you get the nice-to-haves like safety, belonging and esteem. And at the top you get self-actualisation.

This theory is supposed to be useful when you manage people. Now, I've never been in a workplace that lays on food or sleep, let alone sex. And I've definitely never been in a workplace that provides self-actualisation. I think I'd feel pretty suspicious if it did.

The IT Crowd

Why I like working with geeks:
1. There is always someone to talk to on Twitter.
2. They make you realise that Microserfs was not fiction.
3. They never say things like: ‘We can get on with our project because management are more interested in other things.’ They do say: ‘The eye of Sauron is turned elsewhere.’

Don't treat me like a child

The Guardian has profiled two people about being ‘older women’ in the workplace. Is this an issue? It’s what you make of it.

There have been times, working among twenty- and thirty-somethings, when I’ve felt invisible. There have been other times when I’ve felt accepted. But that works both ways.

The generation gap is always going to seem wider if you’re looking downwards from a great height. The woman in the article describes her younger colleagues as ‘babies’ and ‘children’. The Guardian writer mentions ‘prejudice and discrimination’... Looks like it works both ways.

Yes, I have felt overlooked by ultra-fashionable types. Yes, I have felt marginalised by the preponderance of 80s pop music at works dos. And yes, it did hurt a bit to hear a colleague agonising over her ‘quarter century’, when my own half-century was approaching. But she wasn’t to know about my birthday: I was keeping it quiet.

Many of my colleagues don’t know anything about life before mobile phones, the internet, or student debt. That doesn’t make them stupid. It just means they see things differently.

It took a bit of getting used to, but after a while you stop noticing. Just because someone has different cultural references doesn’t mean they have nothing in common with you. There have been times in my working life when the people I’ve clicked with the most were the youngest ones in the office. Partly because they hadn’t been in the organisation long enough to get institutionalised. Partly because we shared the same values. For the women who want to dismiss others as ‘babies’, ever heard of ‘respect’? I believe it’s quite a buzz word among the young.

Mad Men

‘Youngsters aren’t just fresher versions of us. They don’t know anything,’ says Don Draper in Mad Men. Don Draper is 36. He’s also a fictional character. But he’s right. At work, I know much more than the youngsters. And they don’t know the half of it. There’s hidden power in being old. On the outside, you look just like them, only older. On the inside, you have a secret weapon. You’re not afraid to say no.

David Cassidy and the concrete ceiling

One day in the mid 1970s I horrified my English teacher when she found me reading Jackie magazine. She knew my favourite book was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and couldn’t understand how I could hold two such contradictory positions.

Holding contradictory positions is, of course, a requirement of being a teenager (or any other transitional period, eg becoming middle-aged). And, as a talking head said in a recent TV programme about the magazine ‘If it was in Jackie... Jackie magazine was the bible.’

Outside the classroom, Jackie taught me everything I knew. How to put on make-up (I still do it the same way today). How to lose weight by eating half a Mars bar instead of a whole one. What to wear. How to talk to boys. There was sensible advice from Cathy and Claire, and some slightly less sensible (in fact, rather dodgy) fortune-telling quizzes. And there were, of course, the posters of Marc Bolan and David Cassidy, even if it was tricky putting them up without getting sellotape on the wallpaper (I think I was at university before they invented blu-tack).

It was also, as another talking head put it, ‘a 1950s bubble merging into the 1970s’. I didn’t realise until I bought a copy of a Jackie anthology for my sister’s birthday how shocking its real message was. Any girl shown in the magazine who had a job was a secretary or, if she was really glamorous, a receptionist. That was it.

When I started secondary school, the headmistress went round the class asking us what we wanted to be when we grew up. The majority chose to be hairdressers or air stewardesses (and this was a grammar school, where you might have expected some aspirations). Well, the only role models we had for 'career women' were scary spinsters like her and her colleagues.

By the time you got to sixth form, things had changed a bit. If you were top of the class you were going to university. A little below and you were going to teacher training college. Anyone left after that was going to work in a bank. University wasn’t a career move: it was an end in itself. No-one suggested what you might do afterwards. I’m not sure anyone actually came out and said it, but I got the impression that the main purpose of university was upward mobility via marriage. I was expected to find a nice middle-class boy who would go into a nice professional job so I wouldn’t have to worry about a career... Actually, what I did do at university was discover feminism.

This is recent history. So why are we surprised by headlines about the ‘concrete ceiling’? There are many good reasons why there are so few women in the board room. Partly it’s because, in the business world, social bonding is done through conversations about football not conversations about shoes. Partly it’s because women are too sensible to buy into the long-hours culture: we’d rather have a life. And partly it’s because we were never taught to want it. Partly, of course, it’s also because we grew up in an era where working for ‘the man’ (as opposed to ‘a man’) was not something to aspire to anyway.

But there weren’t alternative role models for girls, either. When I started looking beyond Jackie magazine, I had to find my inspiration in things written by men and about men: there was, after all, no book called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.