Marvin Adams and I have teamed up to create a professional development course for career professionals, “Winning Strategies for the Mature Job Seeker,” at CEUOnestop. This self-paced, online course looks at the unique issues that older clients face as more and more people are looking for work. Career professionals will find information, resources and links to websites that provide insight and tips for dealing with the perceptions, myths and realities of being over 50 and looking for work today. ( 4 CEUs)
Many people feel that age is just a state of mind, so there really aren’t any new challenges for the older job seeker. And Age discrimination is illegal. So what’s the problem? For most people, of any age, a well-defined job search strategy is the key to finding a great job. Yet, people who have lost jobs after 20+ years or working are quite lost when it comes to present-day job search tools and strategies. Fold in the assumptions and biases that both older and younger workers hold about people nearing retirement and you have a recipe for conflict and angst.
Career professionals can look at these assumptions and the research that provides facts and data to create their own strategies for coaching older clients. Remembering that “perceptions are real,” too many people operate on their own limited knowledge, experience or relationships with older people. Several reputable organizations have published research dispelling assumptions about low energy, poor health, technology averse or out-of-date skills, to name a few. We can help our clients leverage the benefits of a long work experience by reframing them in terms that meet employer’s needs today. We can probe for the transferable skills of unpaid activities that employers now crave. We can coach them to counter age discriminatory beliefs by developing examples of their work ethic, dependability, problem-solving and their results-oriented focus. Through understanding this generation cohorts’ resiliency, we can help them overcome self-limiting beliefs, create tenacious job seeking strategies and become valuable assets of the workforce. 
