Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Older workers can be creative links to the future

Monday night, I drove way over – I mean waaaay ooooover – to Elyria, a town west of Cleveland in Lorain County, Ohio, to attend a community class about the online business-social network, LinkedIn.

It was already dark when I set out and, this being December in Northeast Ohio, it almost immediately began to sleet/rain and blow. Thanks to the weather, the rush-hour traffic (amazingly, there are still a few people employed around here) and the unfamiliar roads, it took me more than an hour to reach the campus of Lorain County Community College. I met up with a friend, as planned, and the two of us eventually found the right building, tramped through mounds of plowed snow and made it to the classroom just as things were getting started. 

The place was packed. On a cold, wet, messy Monday night, more than 50 people were jamming this big room to hear the director of human resources from the regional Time Warner Cable office talk about a social network.

That surprised me. But what surprised me even more was finding out that the class was aimed at people over 50 who were changing careers and/or between jobs. One of them, I discovered, was a former colleague of mine who had recently been laid off.

That put their numbers in a new and dismaying light that had nothing to do with the typically greenish flourescent illumination. How many of these experienced people, still of working age and with decades of knowledge and skill, had been lost from the local workforce? At an age when American workers of earlier eras were secure in their company positions and looking forward to enjoying hard-earned pensions when they hit 65, how many of these folks were professionally and economically adrift?

In between the tips on LinkedIn etiquette and which icons to click to make a PDF of your resume, I found myself wondering if most of my classmates were just trying to find any decently paid work that would see them through the next few years or if some wanted to turn their personal employment crisis into an opportunity to innovate their lives.

A current catchphrase says that 50 is the new 30, which makes me laugh when I look in the mirror. But I also believe that 50 and older is an excellent time of life for becoming an entrepreneur. True, entrepreneurship is something like parenthood: It’s never truly convenient to subsume your whole existence to the care, feeding and raising of an infant entity. But I’ve always thought that experience and resources were more critical to the process than youth. Though your energy is more limited, you know how to use what you have more efficiently and you have the discipline to push yourself harder. 

Change is scary, particularly change you didn’t ask for, but I wanted to stand up and tell this roomful of late-middle-agers to be brave – not to settle for another dubious paycheck from another heartless and poorly-run corporation, but to use their lifetimes of knowledge to think new ideas, invent new ways to improve the world and, in the process, make something new of themselves.  

That’s how each of us can take an event that was beyond our control and shape it to our mutual advantage. And maybe that’s the best use of networks like LinkedIn – not simply to find jobs, but to form virtual brain trusts that will create new ones. If we don’t do that, we’ll just be using a futuristic tool to perpetuate the past.