With more workers working longer, an important element of their status in the workplace involves how the employer perceives them and how they present themselves in terms of age, according to a study by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work.
Perceptions of age can have important implications for issues such as opportunities for advancement on the one hand versus, for example, an employer preparing to phase out an employee because of a perception that the employee will—or should—be retiring in the near future. The study found that individuals see age in more varied ways than do employers for career purposes.
In addition to chronological age, it said, workers also see themselves as a member of a generation. There are four distinct generations in the current workforce, with the oldest, called "veterans" or "traditionalists" largely gone and with the next generation, those born in 2000 and after, still about a decade from first entering the workforce.
Other standards of how workers perceive their own age include:
* physical age involving health and ability to continue carrying out tasks;
* psycho-social age involving how old others perceive them to be;
* life stage age involving willingness or unwillingness to make changes such as changing jobs depending on family considerations;
* career stage age involving how long someone has been in a particular line of work;
* organization age involving how long someone has been with an organization; and
* subjective age considerations such as how old a person feels overall or versus others in a work unit or versus society’s expectations.
The picture was different when it comes to employer perceptions of age, however; employers focus primarily on which generation an employee belongs to, not on the employee’s specific age. Thus, someone who is a member of the baby boom generation might be seen as being near retirement, since the leading edge members of that generation already have started to retire. However, because that generation covers those born in 1946 through 1964, the youngest members are still only around age 50 and have a decade or more of working years before they reach even the average retirement age of about 62.
Actual chronological age was the second primary focus of employers, it found, followed by life stage and career age.
"Far less relevance was placed on relative age and psycho-social age; however, these dimensions involve perceptions of age in relation to colleagues and thus are dimensions important to consider," the report said.
