I read a recent post that talked about how ageism was being widely practiced and that the percentage of over 40's was the target. The participants went on to discuss how at recurring networking events the age of attendees visibly under age 40 was minuscule, and this seemed to support their position. While I'm sure age discrimination is occurring in many places across the country, I also propose that the relevance people feel they have might actually be on the wane. "We have all these valuable skills" I hear people say; but are these skills really prized by the new leaders of companies today? Are you giving your employer the skills they want/need or are you giving them what you think they need? Much like professional sports, no matter how many championship titles you've helped your team win, regardless of how many Superbowl rings you have in your possession, as soon as someone that can deliver more for less, and for longer, is available, they'll likely take your starting spot. I submit that as a work-force we're becoming victims more of consumerism than ageism. To support this theory with a fairly commonplace example, it can be more cost effective in many cases to replace an average-performing piece of equipment with something that is newer, faster, and with more bells and whistles (not to mention more memory) than to spend the money upgrading what you have for potentially zero ROI. Not coincidentally we're either becoming (or have become) the "older" people we used to talk about replacing, and the only way to avoid being categorized as obsolete and expendable is to be as current and relevant (redundancy intended) as the people who want your job.
I don't mean to drone on about relevance, but how relevant are you? Take for example the 20-something CEO of Facebook; 15 years ago he would have been a gross anomaly, but the leaders that were his age in the dot-com days are now in their mid to late 30's and for them networking doesn't necessarily mean spending an hour or more (plus travel time) to be somewhere in-person for the sake of networking. IM chat, Email, text messaging, social networking sites, Second life, smart phones, iPads...these are the venues for the new networking meetings taking place and, with the technically saavy, they can all be occurring simultaneously! I'll occasionally hear derisive comments regarding this multi-tasking, labeling it instead as A.D.D., an obvious lack of focus, or something similar, but these are the skills that current leadership seems more likely to purchase and promote, so my encouragement is STOP labeling and START LISTENING to what your employer/client is telling you is important to them, even if they're not telling you directly!
I'm not suggesting you give up on what you do well or that you try to be other than who you are but, on a regular basis, you should at the very least be asking yourself if you're connected to what you employer wants or if instead you're offering what you want them to have or feel they need. If it's the latter...you run the risk of failing the relevance test. To personalize this further, if you purchased something expensive and it had all the features you needed at the time, but then the time came you no longer needed all these options (wanting other or different options) and could find them in a newer model for less than the cost of an upgrade, what would you choose to do? ...vinny
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