Lourdes G., quality manager, could not believe what happened to her two years ago. At 58 years old, she was hired by an engineering company, in a town near Madrid, with a salary somewhat lower than her previous job, but it is also true that on this occasion she does not have the leadership. “At my 58 years!”, She points out with great surprise. But it is that, as she explained to her in human resources of her new company, she needed an experienced professional, who from the first day would go hand in hand to get the job done. They could not choose a young man to train. They needed knowledge, and they needed it now.
It is not an isolated case. Experience is a quality that more and more companies are looking for. It is usually more expensive than hiring a young person (although they have bonuses for hiring), but it has the advantage that you don’t have to train it. And at a time like the present, in which it is difficult to fill many positions, seniors are a rising value, indicates the director of the Master’s in Human Resources at Icade, Pedro César Martínez.
And it does not happen only in management positions. Turning to senior workers has spread in many sectors. Rubén García, 52, is a construction manager and for months he has been looking for (and hiring) workers with experience in plumbing, electricity, plasterers… “We need professionals who know how,” he says. “We lack professionals, and the works have to be delivered on time, so the most effective are hired, those who know how,” he justifies.
Pedro César Martínez believes that a solution is “beginning” to a historical problem in Spanish society, the abandonment of seniors. There is still a long way to go, he clarifies, but “it seems” that the current situation, with a shortage of professionals in many sectors, is making it possible to “recover” workers over 50, a group that has numerous advantages: “Experience does not it focuses only on knowledge of the job itself, it has to do with looking at a problem, evaluating it, controlling the situation”, he points out.
For years, workers over the age of 50 have been relegated in a labor market that extols youth, their academic degrees, their desire and their technological knowledge. Young people have something indisputable and highly valued, energy, and given these skills, the older ones have been left in the ditch for years.
Something that, as Pedro César Martínez explains, does not make sense, especially in an increasingly aging society, for which labor is a precious commodity, and even more so when the elderly today are people who are in a perfect state of health. health, with a young spirit and eager to contribute and propose. The 55 or 60 of now have nothing to do with those of yesteryear.
To this we must add, he points out, that the new seniors are also skilled in technology. Young people are more so, as befits their generation, but the new elders have been incorporated into the digital world for years and, above all, they have the desire and capacity to learn, as also pointed out by the experts who participated in the presentation of the II Ranking of Territories for the Senior Economy, prepared by the Mapfre Foundation Ageingnomics Research Center.
The demographic change will end up configuring a labor market very different from the one we have had in past decades with intense socioeconomic consequences. The drop in the birth rate and the increase in longevity are causing a drastic recomposition of the population by age, which will have effects not only on the size of the labor force or the evolution of productivity, but also on the composition of the demand for goods and services or priorities in public spending by governments.
This is indicated by the latest Spanish Economic Papers, by Funcas, dedicated to demographic change, one of the forces with the greatest transforming scope of the global economy, comparable to climate change or technological advances.
In the monograph entitled The Spanish economy facing the demographic challenge , Brindusa Anghel, Juan Francisco Jimeno and Pau Jovell analyze the rapid aging of the working population in Spain, whose average age has increased by more than four years so far this century, and its economic consequences.
Aging is especially intense among non-salaried workers, men, salaried workers in the public sector, employees of small companies and autonomous communities in the north-western part of the Peninsula.
With respect to the profiles of labor income by age, a slowdown in income is observed from the age of 45 and a marked fall from the age of 60, which suggests a sharp decline in productivity in these age groups.
If between 2002 and 2022 the employed population increased by around 18%, the employed population aged 50 or over more than doubled, while the employed population aged 16 to 29 fell by half.
“This phenomenon, which complicates the generational substitution of workers in all segments of the labor market, affects the aggregate growth of productivity, the main engine of long-term economic growth. In order to slow down and reverse this aging process and, therefore, avoid the potential effect on the productive structure, immigration and the birth rate are key,” this publication points out.
