In a world where we want value in our products and services, it is any wonder we want the same thing from our employees?
If you can hire a perfectly healthy person at 22 to handle a manual labor job with the goal of having the person continue in that role possibly for next 20 years more in your company, why would you hire a person at 65 to do the same, especially if the older person has higher income expectations due to greater family needs?
Obviously, employers rarely hire a worker to do the same job for the next 20 years. They expect people to grow – learn how to take on different responsibilities. When we create a forklift, we expect the worker to learn how to operate it to move more boxes and do it more quickly. Leading growth companies know this and are becoming “Continuous Improvement Learning Organizations (CILOs), where growth goals are an intrinsic part of each employee’s job description, review and reward system. Thus, the job changes and/or the employee advances (promotion) to a new role.
What’s missing in a standard job application and often job interview, is that we’re looking for employees with the interest and capabilities of growing. Sure they have to have the technical (hard) skills for the job; but they also have to have the “soft†skills – knowing how to collaborate, communicate and forge effective teams aligned with corporate goals. Research shows that finding people with the right “soft†skills is harder than finding people with the right hard skills.
They need a “growth†mindset as Carol Dweck called it. This means learning how to constantly improve, rather than blaming failures onoutside forces, they focus on what they can do differently to succeed. Thesepeople have “growth†skills such as grit and resilience – “stick-with-itnessâ€and the ability to bounce back. They have wisdom – they’ve learned what thingswork best and which don’t and apply it to the new job.
When you look at people who are working after 65, including entrepreneurs, judges (e.g., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86) and Corporate Directors (e.g., Carl Icahn, 83), you realize that each of them is valuable because they have expertise and experiences that provide the wisdom with which to make better decisions. We call these people SharExers – people who focus their value as a willingness to share wisdom and insights based on expertise and experience.
Therefore the question facing people looking for jobs as they get older and is whether they can demonstrate to prospective employers that they are SharExers. With their growth mind-set, they build upon their expertise and experience to provide increased valuable to the employer than someone without.
Unfortunately, traditional chronological job resumes do not highlight a SharExer’s strength, Nor do the traditional interview approach. To learn more about how to reposition yourself as a SharExer, contact us at success@SharExer.com.
