Rethink Ageing by Reshmi Chakraborty & Nidhi Chawla

Author:Reshmi Chakraborty & Nidhi Chawla [Chakraborty, Reshmi & Chawla, Nidhi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789354927607
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2022-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

How Easy Is It to Kick-Start Your Second Innings?

‘Most of the people in this newsroom are in their twenties and thirties. How do you think you’re going to be able to fit in?’ an employer asked Nishi Malhotra, sixty-two, when she applied for a senior position with a media firm. Malhotra, a veteran editor from Noida, went on to work successfully with other organizations that had younger teams but says the bias she encountered against age is real. She has faced it a few times in her career as she grew older, including facing prejudice because of her grey hair on one account, despite a stellar resume.

Malhotra’s experience is not rare or specific to India. Globally, employers often use ‘coded language’ in their vacancy advertisements to filter out older adults. A 2019 BBC report says how the terms used are often ‘recent college graduates’ or ‘digital natives,’ a smart way to weed out an older generation because the company wants to appear young and hip!5

Ageism is often the elephant in the room when hiring decisions are made, trumping other factors like experience and talent. The reality hits hard when you hear the number of attendees at the annual job fair conducted by the Nightingales Medical Trust (NMT) in Bengaluru. NMT runs Jobs 60+, an initiative to upskill and equip senior citizens for a second innings. In 2017, we visited their annual fair at a school ground in Bengaluru. The long line of senior applicants (2000 plus, we heard later) we saw there was an eye-opener for us. Many of them were in their late sixties and early seventies, scanning the few stalls put up by prospective employers and submitting resumes that sometimes had way more experience than the job on offer needed. The number of employers at the fair? Sixty-one.

The last job fair by NMT was held before the pandemic in 2019. Word had spread about the fair and the attendees numbered 5,000—many travelling from cities outside Bengaluru to attend the fair. Swati Bhandari, associate director, NMT, says it’s a sign that there is an increased and urgent need for financial independence and continued productivity among Indian elders.

Unfortunately, jobs are few and far between. The number of employers at the NMT Job Fairs has remained between sixty to 100. There’s also scepticism among some employers about hiring senior citizens, mainly because of a mismatch in their skills and the roles and requirements of today’s organizations. Technical knowledge and remote working still remain alien to many older adults. Work from home, a pandemic-created need, is a concept that many older job seekers find hard to adjust to says Puja Kohli who runs Unfold, an HR consultancy that has been doing a second-innings transition programme for older adults. Both Kohli and Bhandari tell us that jobs requiring a physical presence often present problems like longer commutes and inflexible hours, sometimes difficult for an older person to manage.

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