Source: canadianmanufacturing.com
Job transitions have always been an area of challenge for mid-career workers. A research project highlights the potential inherent in reskilling and hiring this pool of talent
In the movie The Intern, a 70-year-old Robert De Niro decides to make a career change and lands an internship at an online fashion startup overflowing with young millennials and free food. The running joke in this film is that DeNiro is too “old” to create space for himself in a startup, a world for the “young.”
While De Niro’s character is fictional, the lessons in this film about talent and ageism in the tech sector are quite real.
In displaying the golden goose of characteristics that many of Canada’s tech giants are after – a desire to constantly learn and grow – the analogy of the “aged intern” highlights tech’s next greatest talent pool: the middle-aged or “mid-career” worker.
We’ve spent several decades studying and operating in the skills training and workforce development space. While job transitions have always been an area of challenge for mid-career workers, our research with the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship has highlighted the looming impacts of automation in exacerbating that challenge, as well as the inherent opportunity for these workers to be absorbed into the digital economy, an area of high growth desperate for talent.