Nowadays, more and more older people who need employment have to compete with younger people for the same jobs.

What problems does this cause?

What are the solutions?


Work is worship, but worshippers are widespread. On top, the modern economic ecosystem has pitted age-wise incomparable individuals against one another for work opportunities.

One major repercussion of this state-of-affairs is unfair competition. That is to say, with distinct body and mental configurations, men and women twenty to forty years old sit exams and appear for common interviews. This gamut of ages and abilities is a clear sign of apples versus oranges. For example, while the senior lot abound with experience, the young parade exude technological superiority.

Nonetheless, this bottleneck can be eliminated with employment stratification. To be precise, there ought to be strategized segregation pertaining to who fits what. Along with this employment compartmentalization, there must be domain-specific tests for the sectoral niches. To illustrate, it could be that managerial posts are for the seniors, and they would have to prove their organizational skills. On the contrary, the young shall apply for the technical departments conducting a related aptitude test.

Another issue that originates from the imbalanced hiring scenario is after the positions have been filled. In other words, after both the old and the young have gotten same roles, they are going to work together. This, in turn, is going to result in hapless heterogeneous environments in which incompatible colleagues do not gel with one another. For instance, a twenty-five-year-old might not take a shine to a forty-year-old colleague’s burp-as-you-like-it habit. Similarly, the former’s slang might irritate the latter.

This predicament, nevertheless, can be put paid to by the hiring organizations. To elaborate, holding regular get-togethers for employees will make them comfortable with each other in non-work environments. The ensuing camaraderie, then, would lead to tolerance in the workplaces, too. A case in point is of my former colleague Shyam and I. Owing to a twelve-year age gap between us, we only used to wish each other in the office. Once I met him outside, and we came across a recognition that we pronounced a cussword in the same way. Since then, we have been firm friends.

In conclusion, yuppies against yeomen is unhealthy as it is not conducive to workplace milieux, and it is a hallmark of occupational injustice. Appropriate sectoral assigning can nip this conundrum in the bud whereas official gatherings can come in useful after the hirings.