Massive middle age unemployement

[ottg]

"Over the past decade, the average duration of unemployment has been 18 weeks for teenagers and 65 weeks for 45-54-year olds, much the same as it was at last count in March"

Older Workers left behind

How can this be changed?

How can innovation and import replacement programs help?

If this is already happening for past 10-years why is it then accepted as the norm? Does this offer some opportunities? What do you think?

[Mara]

This may be true, but I think a lot depends on the availability of jobs and what the attributes are that they are looking for. I am also not always convinced by statistics, because unless you know how they gathered their information and what their categories were for making their assumptions the poll could be pretty slanted to the wrong side! For instance, why was the 60 year old out of work for a year, were there no jobs for him/her to apply for or was it a case of not finding a job that fitted what they were prepared to offer, ie hours, travel time, job description, abilities, etc.

Within my contacts and knowledge, artisans are sought after, regardless of age, and often the older they are the more sought after they are because of their excellent training and qualifications they often have. In office work, I have found that often employers make way for a younger employee as they think that long term they would get more out of them, which, personally I think they would have more stability with an older person in a lot of instances.

There are a lot of small, owner run companies, in Australia. Which is quite different to the huge businesses that we were used to working for in RSA. In this scenario the promotional abilities are pretty much flat line and therefore people do not stay to long in the same job as they have to move on if they want to be promoted!

So, I think really that it depends on the company, just read between the lines when you look at job ads, they are not allowed to state an age in their ads here, so if you see the words mature minded, then more often than not they are looking for an older person.

I still think that there are lots of job opportunities for older folk in Australia, well definitely more than in the RSA.