Today’s climate: a good example of the benefits of older workers
September 19, 2008
Us HR people are used to preaching the business benefits of diversity in the workplace, and I think the massive national catastrophe it appears the UK is now facing perfectly demonstrates the argument in relation to our older workforce, particularly in relation to HR and senior/executive management positions.
What do I mean by this? I mean that thousands of people gain their CIPD qualification every year, moving through the ranks to middle and senior management. Likewise many top level managers across industry have moved into these positions in the last few years. At the other end of the age bracket a lot of the HR professionals and managers who have the experience to deal with the problems thousands of companies are now facing have retired. So despite the fact that us fresh faced CIPD grads may have all the newest people management theories and ideas to hand, quite a lot of us were doing our GCSEs the last time the country faced a recession (or were maybe even younger than that!) Skills such as dealing with large scale re-structure or redundancy are in high demand at the moment, and many people who have been in the profession less than 10-15 years will have not seen anything like the current conditions before, or were not in a position to deal with them the last time and therefore have no experience to draw on.
There’s a lot of help and advice out there for companies facing these issues and requiring skills of this type, so I don’t think this is a massive concern. I just think that this situation highlights the benefits of having a good age range within organisations, in order to deal with the day to day needs of the business through a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical experience, and to look at things from a variety of perspectives.
Comments
Got something to say?