A new NBER Working Paper, Countries For Old Men: An Analysis Of The Age Pay Gap by Nicola Bianchi and Matteo Paradisi, reveals, reveals that the pay gap between older and younger workers has been widening for decades across high-income countries, with wages of older workers growing much faster than those of their younger counterparts. The paper uses administrative and survey data to investigate this growing wage disparity.
I’m in my early 40s, and my experience is a polar opposite of yours. I worked for a company straight out of college that, like your experience, didn’t value me or really want to train me.
After 5 years, I moved to a nonprofit and just celebrated my 14 year anniversary there. They have bankrolled several professional certifications and have a genuine interest in developing my career. I have moved into a leadership position, and while I have always been challenged in my growth process, and don’t make near as much as I could at a for-profit company, my salary and work life balance is fantastic.
What industry are you in? Cybersecurity for me. Maybe a different employer might make a difference for you? I’m not sure what your details are, but there are jobs like mine out there.
I couldn’t imagine starting at ground zero today, however. I can appreciate just how hard today’s youth have it, which likely will be similar for my young boys as they reach working age.
GIS, geology and land surveying are the fields I have experience in.
I know there are jobs out there that are good, but there is a part of me inside that is broken from the way that I can feel myself and other people my age being rejected from having a future. Even if I get lucky and get a nice job, I got lucky, things didn’t get better for everybody and… I don’t know it makes sparking fires in my heart like trying to start a campfire with a bunch of damp logs. You can kinda do it… but it always feels like you are putting in more energy than you are getting out.
How do you raise a generation into adulthood while teaching them that they have the privilege of being the particular generation to witness the destruction of our planet as we know it? To understand that their elders are not holders of stories and wisdom but strangers from the world before who still cling violently to their past realities? I know it is a distraction to speak of one generation vs. another generation, that the causes of these problems have to do with wealth inequality and capitalism not some genetic wiring to a particular generation of people (generalizations are always wrong too)… but while recognizing that there is no war but the class war… I also feel compelled to take the long view (I am trained as a geologist after all) that this is a unique period of history where by and large the parents of one generation collectively abandoned a sense of responsibility towards passing on a world to the children of the next generation (and their children and so on). There is a ravine here, between future generations (my generation included) and my parents generation, and I am convinced it will be a ravine that will be spoken of for a very very very long time (it isn’t hyperbolic to say thousands of years assuming humanity goes on that long). It is weird to be living through the middle of it forming.
I’m not ready to crush their spirit yet with the cold truth, as they’re both under 10. However, I’m certainly not going to go the “well just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” approach that my Boomer parents generation took towards younger generations.
I’m also not going to do this reply any justice typing on my phone, but the destruction you speak of (and I don’t disagree that it’s happening) has been occurring for decades, it’s not a recent development, although it has definitely sped up during my lifetime.
I don’t disagree with your thought that there’s a ravine. It’s going to be my generation and younger ones that have to pull us out of it (in the sense of taking responsibility and shepherding our children forward), which is not going to be easy.
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Are they hiring ?
Yes, they are almost always hiring, I will DM you
I think the issue is that jobs that aren’t like your job exist. Glad you’re doing good. We all deserve to thrive, not just survive.