A statuesque statute
Age discrimination affects the interim management profession as much as any other. Next month’s anti-ageism law may not be enough on its own to solve the problem
Date:
14 September 2006
Source:
Guide to interim management
Page:
25
Not far from where I sit writing this article there stands an almost iconic piece of modern sculpture called the Angel of the North. The towering raw steel figure dominating the main road into central Tyneside is loved by many and hated by some, but, given its enigmatic fluted structure and paradoxical aircraft wing design, few claim to really understand it. A bit like the forthcoming regulations on age discrimination, then?
Like the angel, the legislation is not quite the shape that most of us presumed it would be. Its aims are not as clearly defined as many of us would like and, while it seems to address some of our expectations, it also creates new uncertainties to ponder.
Over the past year I have had reason to consider this issue at some length. I resigned, aged 58, from my four-year tenure as group HR manager of the UK’s largest display marketing plc for the perceived greater variety and wider challenge of the interim market. Bad mistake. Despite not being badly qualified, I found out the hard way that the reality for many recruiters remains that if they do not filter out the “oldies” on demand, someone else will. Recent experience suggests that some of them will certainly feel pressured to continue doing so after October, when the new law comes into force. Hence my thinking at length about why age discrimination is such a difficult arena.
The answer seems both glaringly obvious and fiendishly complex: in ageism we’re not looking at a clear “either/or” state of being, but at a continuum. Furthermore, society actively – and quite properly – cultivates in us from birth the very stereotypical thinking that we’re now trying to shed in employment. We take it for granted that young people are excluded from driving, smoking, having sex and being held culpable for crimes. Many will remain disenfranchised until 18, an age at which they could already have been in work or work-based education for two years.
With today’s easy medical access it’s also easy to forget that barely more than a generation ago the source of many of our cultural stereotypes about advancing age was the deterioration in health, often from occupational causes, that really did make older workers less reliable and physically capable, to say nothing of understandably less enthusiastic or compliant.
So how do we rid ourselves of all this socially cultured prejudice and stop considering age as an inherent factor in employment effectiveness? Possibly the first thing we all need to do is pressure all recruiters, whether our own corporate managers or outsourced agents, to review their personal agendas and abide by the principles of the legislation.
We also need to think beyond the obvious measures of removing birth dates from forms and taking out age-related qualifications for status or pay. We should focus instead on the clear analysis of roles and the skills needed to fill them, defining these as quantifiable criteria rather than vague generalities of achievement such as “graduate calibre” and/or lengths of unquantified experience.
Job candidates, particularly interims, can help the process and themselves by not only removing age indicators from their CVs but also dumping the standard phrase “three years’ experience of…” for more rigorous indications of what they did in those years. For example, how much of that time was spent drinking tea and playing golf and how much on Tupe or employee relations?
Age has no minorities; we will all move from “too young” to “too old” effortlessly as the clock ticks. So perhaps the real need is for respect of our abilities, not for how long we’ve been around – and then, possibly, for the philosophy of doing unto others as we would one day like done to ourselves.
About the author
Peter Cunningham is and HR interim and newly appointed consultant with Alternative Solutions