Few of us knowingly discriminate against “old” people. But age discrimination is out there. It is often quite subtle. The IT World has peculiar ways of discriminating against older IT professionals.
It was while cleaning up some files on my computer that I came across a relic from 2006! Imagine that. It was a lesson that I had learned, yet forgotten. It was back in 2002 I had my first encounter with “age discrimination”. I was only 47 years old. I had resigned from my position at the School of Medicine. I began to look for work elsewhere. It was then I noticed a disturbing pattern. Having some time to reflect on it, I wrote these thoughts about it a few years later.
Few of us knowingly discriminate against “old” people. But picture this. You are 45, you have 25 years of experience in IT including 10 years of developing turnkey database solutions. With a hefty resume like that, you would think it would be a snap to get a job. Yet for me, in 2002, I came upon one rejection after another. I thought it was just me. But I came across a report that shed some light on this matter. Published by Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the report noted that as many as 5% of surveyed IT jobseekers observed what they felt was age discrimination. The count of complaints filed with the EEOC had climbed steadily since 1997. What was causing this trend?
| Age 40-54 | Age 55-64 | Age 65 + | Missing Data | |
| 1990 | 51% | 38% | 8% | 3% |
| 2000 | 52% | 33% | 11% | 6% |
| 2010 | 44% | 43% | 13% | 0% |
| 2017 | 37% | 48% | 17% | 0% |
In my case the proxy of age discrimination was “certifications.” In the IT world, there are dozens of certifications that focus on specific aspects of IT and the requirement that applicants earn certifications had become one of the most controversial topics in IT by the mid-2000s. I played on both sides of the field of this debate as an IT professional and as an educator. The question people were trying to answer was “What is the role of certifications?” Do they truly reflect the capabilities of a person? Should they be a requirement for the job? As the report noted above, I wasn’t the only person who encountered this paradox. Does a certification matter more than twenty years of experience in IT?
To understand how this affected an older person, consider that they actually “grew up” in the IT industry, some not even obtaining a college degree. In my case, many of these certifications did not exist when I was younger. College degrees in computer science had almost no relevance to the emerging technologies of the 80’s and 90’s. IT specialists of this generation learned the trade on-the-fly. Yet, after ten years, they knew their field inside and out. But employers needed something to appraise the qualifications of IT professionals. Certification standards were developed. Courses were developed, books published and a burgeoning industry of IT training emerged.
What employers were asking sounded reasonable, but it did not mesh with the real world. To obtain a certificate often took thousands of dollars plus exceptional cost in time and possibly travel expenses. The exams cost anywhere from $75 to $500 each and some certifications required the completion of as many as seven exams. Add to that the fact that many of the testing standards changed every three years. In essence, a hard-earned certificate could be obsolete in five years. So it was that some employers expected applicants to have the most recent certifications. Unlike a Masters Degree, a certification could be viewed as meaningless if it was more than three years old. It was not a “terminal” degree. As you can imagine, it was like a dog chasing his tail. And yet a person, like myself, was not hired because they lacked some sort of certification.
As a university instructor I became mindful of the relevance of a degree toward the future employability of my students. It was rather ironic, but a student could earn a four year degree in computer technology yet not get a job because they did not earn a certificate. It was then that I learned how major job services often advertised for jobseekers using a system where subscribing employers scanned their databases for key terms and certification acronyms such as A+, CNE, MCSE and Cisco. As I experienced in 2002, the interesting characteristic of many 45 year old IT professionals was that they did not have those letters in their resume. Instead, they would have had phrases like “Masters Degree” or “10 years experience developing database solutions.” Interesting how those key terms were never entered into the search field.
What began to evolve was that the IT industry was getting a new generation of 20-somethings with an armload of certifications, while IT professionals with 20 years experience and no certifications were not even invited to a job interview. Yet, as the decades passed, employers realized that what they needed were problem solvers and IT professionals with a sense of how a business works. In other words, employers were trying to find ways to rediscover the 40-somethings who could fill the void.
So this remains an ongoing tension. From my perspective, I observed at that time a psychological aspect to age discrimination, the assumption that older people could not learn anything new. Learning new technology is fundamental to surviving in the IT arena. So I found it very short-sided by employers who would, during the interview process, signal that whatever function a new hire was to perform was beyond the reach of an older person. I recall chuckling that I was not hired to be a database administrator because I did not know Oracle, as if ten years of designing database applications was so alien from Oracle, that the basic structure of SQL was so radically different between MS-SQL, DB2 and MySQL. The only answer I could think of was that they must have thought I was too old to figure it out.
Ironically, certifications have been underutilized in areas where they would actually be quite helpful. Surveys noted that firms under-invested in their existing staff, causing turnover in critical positions and performance issues. Certification training could help in those situations providing valuable professional networking opportunities, diversifying the knowledge pool of employees and improving morale. In my experience I found it interesting that janitors had a better planned education than IT personnel.
It must be emphasized that some certifications are very difficult to attain, and reflect a person’s commitment to learning and interest in a particular field. They have their place. To be fair to the folks in human resources, filling an IT position is a daunting task and it is difficult to gauge knowledge and experience. But I leave this discussion with an important point – IT is as much art as knowledge.
Solving this Riddle
Each field of employment has its own set of unique challenges when it comes to age discrimination. Some are quite hard to resolve. Age brings with it health challenges and some jobs are simply too strenuous. You don’t see too many seventy year old police officers or fire fighters. But IT is an industry that should not have any age discrimination. Yet it is always present. How can this be resolved?
The most frequent instances of age discrimination I have observed with many employers have to do with job requirements. I interviewed for several jobs of which one proved most challenging and interesting. After hearing the long list of duties a person was to fulfill, I asked the question, “Was the previous network manager a monk?” They laughed and confessed that he was. My reply was that I was a family man. I intended to be home at 6 PM so I could spend time with my family. If they hired me, I would redesign their network so that it was possible to do the job in a normal eight hour day. They did not hire me. They hired a young, single fella who previously worked with Sprint. Turned out we would be working together in the years ahead and it was rather funny that he did exactly what I said would need to be done. He, too, wanted a normal life.
Elon Musk, like almost any other Silicon Valley entrepreneur, expects his IT people to put in long hours. That’s fine when you are young and single. It is not reasonable when you have children to raise. Such a work model is implicitly age discriminatory.
The second element of this riddle is the recognition that multi-exam certificates need to be acknowledged as terminal degree equivalents. In fact, the security certificate (CISSP) is recognized as such in many colleges. It’s learning model is quite similar to that of an MBA. The same should apply to advanced Cisco certificates or MCSE’s from Microsoft. Once earned, they need to be recognized as terminal degrees. You wouldn’t expect a person to get a Master’s Degree every five years in the same subject. Neither should you expect a renewed Cisco or MCSE certificate. There are better and more cost effective ways to keep current on emerging technologies.
The third element is for employers to invest in professional development. Educate your IT staff in a manner that enhances their skills and improves their performance in the work place. Older people are not lazy. I was just as inquisitive at the age of 60 as I was at the age of 30. The US Forest Service was good at recognizing this. Rather than pursue a pointless certificate at the age of 58, I instead focused on performance analytics. I avoided being beleaguered with memorizing rote knowledge, instead expanding my skills from the likes of system analysts at Netflix and MIT. These skills were immediately applied to my job. I earned no “certificates” for that knowledge. But the educational experience was worth every moment of my time. Come to think of it, I don’t think there is a certificate in performance analytics.
A Good Ending
Fortunately for me, my career ended on a good note. I worked for the US Forest Service. What I observed was that older personnel were not discarded, that experience weighed heavily in job selection. While certificates were encouraged, the chief objective was problem solving. As a result, I worked around people who were older and well experienced in the craft. And – not surprisingly – sometimes lacking those “certificates.”
Which brings to mind why I forgot about that note I made to myself in 2006. It is answered with one word. Alaska. Employers were desperate for IT specialists in 2006 and still are today. Getting someone to move to Juneau, 850 miles north of Seattle, was like moving to Japan! The type of IT person they needed up there was someone who could think on their feet, improvise and open up a book and self-educate. The employment environment up there was totally different from the dog-eat-dog competition in the lower-48.
As the IT industry has matured, it is interesting to observe how older people are now often in demand, depending on the circumstances. Even as recent as 2018, I and a colleague of like age had to blow off the dust on RS-232 DB-9 connections, finding a matching cable that would interconnect to a USB port, so we could program instructions in Telnet. And like the old astronauts in Space Cowboys, older IT personnel are called upon to decode an ancient script that is suddenly discovered to be critical to the operation of a control system. Seems like COBOL programmers never go out of style. Maybe, just maybe, it may be a good idea to keep an old fogie around.
Resources
“2014 Job Seeker Survey: More Long-Term Unemployed, Underemployed,” Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., January 27, 2015
“Baby boomers face financial distress and age discrimination,” MarketWatch, by Howard Gold, July 3, 2021.
© Copyright 2024 to Eric Niewoehner