Does The Age Of An Employee Matter To An Employer?

Copyright (c) 2011 Jim Terroirier

When deciding whether or not to take up or retain a job, people often worry about factors such as the state of the job market, or whether their own talents and training are matched to the job. There is also another factor: the health of the person in question.

For instance, a person may have the necessary drive, knowledge, and analytical skill to be an archaeologist. He or she might be an expert in ancient languages, and also able to make accurate deductions based on just a few very heavily damaged artifacts. However, if his or her health is not up to the physical work of excavation, his or her prospects in the field may be severely compromised. It is true that some division of labor occurs in archaeology, to the extent that some specialists focus on analyzing artifacts, leaving others to actually dig them up. However, even those specialists probably spent some time on digs earlier in their career.

There are also the changes in a person's health that happen over time. Recruiters often keep these in mind, resulting in both overt and covert ageism in the job market. One example is in the hiring of nurses in some hospitals. In many hospitals in the Philippines, even in the relatively prestigious Heart Center, hospital management makes it a point not to hire people in their late thirties or older as regular nurses. Younger, stronger people with healthy immune systems are preferable to older nurses, despite the practical experience and knowledge that the latter can offer.

If you are an older person who wants to combat ageism in hiring, you can greatly strengthen your case by boosting your own health, and becoming a living example of the idea that more mature individuals need not be a liability to a business establishment. Even if you do not experience ageist discrimination, or manage to overcome it, you should still be on your guard so you can continue to perform well at work. In general, job security is not what it was a few decades ago, and competition can be fierce. An older person who wishes to keep working for whatever reason would do well to take strong measures to safeguard his or her health.

If you check the market for health-related products, you can find that many are specifically tailored towards people of more advanced age. For instance, there are sets of vitamin supplements specially formulated for the middle-aged and elderly. There is even a hormone supplement that purports to tackle one of the root chemical causes of aging, i.e. the decline in a person's production of HGH (human growth hormone) as they get older. These pills stimulate your body to produce levels of HGH closer to what it used to make when you were younger. Of course, this is not the literal magic pill to stop aging, but taking this supplement might make the transition to more mature stages of life a little easier.

Perhaps, eventually, greater strides can be made to combat age-ism in hiring practices all over the world. Whether or not this progress benefits you directly, it is still practical to take extra care of your health in order to obtain and keep the job you want.

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