Q. Do you think age has anything to do with your ability to find a job?A. If your skill set, knowledge, personality, and pace are not relevant to your profession and industry, you won’t get hired. Age has nothing to do with it.
Chats on various social networking sites last year batted around the old (no pun intended) question about age in the work place. It’s a common enough query, especially in the semiconductor industry, which still thrums with a vibrancy lacking in other industries hitting the half-century mark. The questions posed to the universe on LinkedIn, for one, went something like this: Do you think that age has anything to do with your ability to find a job?
With 2009 being a tough year, many out-of-work engineers were asking the same question in conversations, email threads, and personal notes. Many of them already had formulated their own answer: Yes. They would pass muster in a telephone interview, but when they met with hiring managers who were younger than they are, they lost the job. “Why didn’t I get hired? They took one look at me and decided I was too old.”
It’s a tidy reason and a tidy answer. But, I’m not sure it’s that simple. I think the real answer lies in the concept of relevance. If your skill set, knowledge, personality, and pace are not relevant to your profession and industry, you won’t get hired. Age has nothing to do with it.
Skill set. If you’ve been out of work for a year or more, your skill set is out of date. The disruptive technology of the Internet, fierce global competition, the scramble for new business in countries off the marketing map just a year ago, have changed all high-tech and business-to-business professions. Think about it. How is your job being done today? If you can’t answer the question, you need to do some research, take a friend for coffee (lunch is so yesterday), and get busy networking.
Knowledge. Let’s say that you know that Brazil and Vietnam are important markets in your industry sector. Great. Now, what do you know specifically about the market size, TAM, tier-one leaders, and customer demographics? How should marketing efforts be tailored to these different cultures? It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about marketing, PR, chip design, or chip fabrication, we all need to know how these jobs are being done differently now. And how they must be done to win new business going forward. I spoke with a start-up recently. They want to build their brand, attract customers and, of course, get orders. They want to do press tours and meet with market analysts to do this, because they feel sure that the media is interested in an innovative new product. (Yes and no.)
There are two flaws in this old marketing line of thought: First, the market is already full of devices that this company is making. The current products may not be as innovative in their technology, but they beat this company to the cash register and so own the market the start-up wants to be in. However much you may love your company’s new product, you need to be brutally realistic and understand that competitive products are available. And you need to be brutally realistic about what makes your product better than anything else out there. The folks at the start-up haven’t worked with a marketer or PR agency in several years, so they were still approaching their job in an old-fashioned way. “Old-fashioned” relating to 2005, of course.
The second problem with the start-up is that they are thinking about press tours as they were done long, long ago – that would be 2001. Thanks to the Internet, industry journalists work out of their home. Many are now blogging and writing their own online publications. Many are now working in other fields, victims of journalism’s waning importance in the commoner-journalist culture we find ourselves in.
Personality. Industries and their members have common personalities. Semiconductor people, for example, seem to be Type-A personalities. This is an industry where companies produce new product versions several times a year. We want change and we want it now. If your personality doesn’t match your old industry, it’s time to find another profession. It’s not a judgment call; it’s simply finding the kind of people you like to be around and work with.
Pace. This pretty much goes with ‘personality’. There’s a pace to every industry. My retired friends often comment that they couldn’t keep up with the workload when I describe it to them. They are happy not having to wear a watch; reading the newspaper – all of it – over coffee in the morning; having lunches that stretch over a few hours; and scheduling activities between commute hours. In the semiconductor industry, we complain about how busy we are; how often we have to fly somewhere; and so on. But, put us behind a desk for any stretch of time, and we’re like George Clooney in Up in the Air: wondering when the next flight leaves.
The economy has played havoc with jobs in the USA. And the ease of releasing workers here is easier than, say some European countries. Some jobs are simply obsolete. Some, like journalism, are victims of a communications and technology shift. These are also reasons for losing a job. But as individuals, we can’t do anything about these macro issues. What we can do is focus on our own strengths and sharpen them; find our own weaknesses and make them strengths. Then head out into the marketplace and clear a path for ourselves. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. Barbara Kalkis, Maestro Marketing & PR (sm)
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