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Selling yourself

The interview

Stay safe or branch out?

Going it alone

Ask our work expert a question

More on age discrimination

Hopes raised for 'common sense ' approach

What the age discrimination law will mean for you

Age discrimination examples

Age discrimination: promotion and training

Age discrimination: redundancy and retirement

Making a claim

Examples of age discrimination

Sir Menzies Campbell's view

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More from Saga

Useful websites

Trades Union Congress

Employers Forum on Age

ACAS

Department of Trade and Industry

_{Talk online to like-minded people at Saga Zone}

The job market

Employers have three main fears about employing older people according to Barry Badham, who set up Dinosaurs Unlimited employment agency five years ago

It's these fears, he says, that older job-seekers will need to confront head on either at the interview or in their covering letter:

"Some firms think they'll take more sick time than younger employees, when in fact it's the other way round.

“They think older people won't be computer literate - in fact 98% of the people on our books are.

“They think that they'll want to retire at 60, so they'll only get five years out of them. Actually, most people want to go on till 65 or older.

“So that's 10 years at least, and that younger person they hire might leave after two years for another job."

Getting a job over 50 is famously difficult. It was never a problem before the 1980s: in 1979 80% of men over 60 were in work, compared to only 50% in the mid 1990s.

But the good news is that the situation has improved in the past five years.

There are now 1.25 million more over 50s in work than in the mid 1990s, says Keith Frost, business manager of The Age and Employment Network charity.

"Some of that is because of population trends - there are simply more people over 50, but it may be also because of shortages of younger workers.”

Specialist recruitment agencies report that it has become markedly easier to place workers over 50 in the past three years.

But the worst areas for ageism are the computer and mobile phone industries and the worlds of sales, marketing and advertising.

If you get depressed by the job search it is worth remembering that in a recent survey of personnel managers they rated older job applicants' reliability, commitment, punctuality and customer service.

Written by Rachel Carlyle

This article was created: 19 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 15 May 2007.

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