Trump, Sanders, Warren, Bloomberg, Biden. Average age for CEOs is on the rise and so is the average retirement age for people in general. Letting go in this sense is retiring or handing off the reigns to younger people so that career advancements can happen throughout the hierarchy. It’s no wonder young people can’t find decent entry level jobs. They are all occupied by those who should have moved past them by now. There’s just nowhere to move up.
Most companies are looking for great people to take on larger roles. A lack of the desired people is typically what holds companies back from expansion. Is it possible that you're making vast generalizations based off the fact that your career isn't moving as fast as you'd like?
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Take it or leave it, i'm going to give you some advise: The types of people who we're looking for to take on new/additional responsibilities are not the kinds of people who believe everything that happens at the executive levels is wrong. People don't get promotions by insulting their bosses. They get them by learning from them.
I retired early two years ago at the top of my field. I witnessed firsthand exactly what I portrayed to you at several different corporations. In fact in the last department I worked, approx 500 people, maybe a dozen were below 35. That included positions I consider entry level.
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I always hired young and enthusiastic over experienced and stagnant. I could have replaced those people 3:1 with people in their early twenties or teens right out of school. In fact the place desperately needed it but there was no where for the people to move up. The C-level was 70-80s the people one level below were 50-60s and on down the line. It was like a traffic jam.
That’s the read all around. Without too much information- I work for a world leader in the field I’m in and same story. They are forced to create bs layers of middle management and VP’s who in some cases are literally the VP of just themselves- we have an entire department of corporate on the edge of retirement and most of our leadership is past retirement age. You won’t find many younger people- even those in their 30’s- in any position of actual authority above leading a team of maybe 3-5 people.
We are stuffed to the brim with guys with one foot out of the game, and as old as I am- guys older than me are working jobs that are entry level or there shouts just to stay in the game. But they just aren’t looking to train younger people- to groom them to be able to take those roles. It’s like some of my peers think they’ll live forever and work forever. There are so many jobs or systems that only one- maybe two people know- and those people are all over 60. But instead of training up the kids- they push them down by layering new middle managers over them and effectively lowering. Their positions and taking administrative and initiative or vision based responsibilities away from them- relocating them to pure technical roles or the watch person over an automated sub system or menial tasks prescribed.
And these kids- I don’t blame them- who wants to put in 5 years at a place where the average guy over you has 25+? When you aren’t learning things and your pay sucks and your only hope of promotion is MAYBE a fake title and small raise? So no one stays long enough to learn the system and when the guys who know it die or retire.... oopsie.
To another of scatmandingos points- it REALLY is about who you are and who you know. Whether it’s travel or seminars or meetings- at higher levels you spend ALOT of time with certain people and generally- people in charge want to make sure the people they have to spend many thousands of hours a year with- the people they will rely on to back them and work with them and shape the direction of things with- they want those people to be not only on “the same page” as them- but people they can stand being stuck with meeting after meeting. Technical skill- unless (or even) EXCEPTIONAL gifts- only go so far. Never forget the person who does the things that make the company run, the person that makes the thing that the company sells- they seldom if ever make what the people who sit in meetings for hours a day do.
@famousone makes a valid point in his post above. The world can’t be handed over like it was in 1950 or whenever because it’s a totally different world. What do you want them to do? Tear down all the power plants and crush all the cars and fill in all the battery mines and close all the factories so you can live like it’s 1950? Also don’t forget that it’s proportional. Their parents of grandparents killed the great buffalo herds and re routed rivers and cut down great forests and paved over them. They strung up power lines and phone poles and created giant factories belching out more pollution than today’s cleaner facilities despite producing less for it.
They DO owe the next generation something. They can’t give you a planet like the one they had any more than their parents could give them a planet like the one THEY had. You’d have to go back to pre industrial society to even come close to parents being able to pass down a planet near identical in pollution and that’s also mainly because there weren’t nearly as many people and they didn’t live as long or have as much. That doesn’t mean they had to completely destroy it before they hand it over. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to reduce and limit the harm they do to the future.
When there were so many buffalo that they were like blades of grass you could kill 1,000 and there’s still be 100 left. The next generation couldn’t have as much. They could kill 100 and leave 10. Now- killing 10 would leave none. So it falls on the next generation to love with less. If you are mad at the boomers do better. Take no buffalo so they can grow- and teach your kids to live without what they don’t need. If every person only used a single trees worth of wood products IN THEIR LIFE that’s still enough trees to consume the entire current Amazon in just a couple centuries.
It sucks- but someone at some point has to pay the debt of past generations living extravagantly. So the current generations have the choice wether or not they will be the ones to step up and live with less to pay those debts- or if like each generation before them they will take whatever is there to make their lives “better” and pass that debt to the future until it gets so bad that it can’t be passed off any more.
We can and should try to change the way the older generations do things with the time they have left. They can and should start- perhaps too late, but better than never- to undo their harms or do no more harm at the futures expense- but when it comes to reap change- 50+ year old people aren’t the ones who are most in a position to shape what the world will be like for your grandkids. You are. If we have the old folks give up 20% just so that we can take and use that 20% for ourselves because we want more- that’s still being used up- it’s still not there for the future. If they give up 30% and the current generation gives up 10%- and no one used that slack to better their own lives- that’s 40% more you can give your kids. If they teach their kids to live that way- someday we could give the future a planet in perhaps better shape than we got it in
@fanousone- yeah. Pretty much. About equal to 12% of a workers wage goes to social security. To pay one person half what the average worker makes- you need 5 workers (rough math.) Now- in theory through bonds and investments etc- that an bring it down- but we should already see a red flag here. But.... since wages have decreased in the US (that is- compared to even 40 years ago they’ve largely stayed the same while inflation has gone up.) So in effect- when social security gets 12% of the current wage- that amount doesn’t equal the same value as 12% did before- and in current trends has continued to decrease in value. So workers don’t make a living wage (I’m not saying. They don’t make ENOUGH- I’m saying that costs have outpaced earnings- and thus social security benefits have increased while the amount coming in has effectively gone down.)
Bonds have largely stagnated- and while people have been having less kids (in large part because the costs to raise kids and resources are getting harder to come by,) human beings are living longer while costs like medical care for newer and more advanced treatments to extend health and lifespan balloon in cost (not helped by the current US medical system and insurance etc.)
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Take it or leave it, i'm going to give you some advise: The types of people who we're looking for to take on new/additional responsibilities are not the kinds of people who believe everything that happens at the executive levels is wrong. People don't get promotions by insulting their bosses. They get them by learning from them.
.
I always hired young and enthusiastic over experienced and stagnant. I could have replaced those people 3:1 with people in their early twenties or teens right out of school. In fact the place desperately needed it but there was no where for the people to move up. The C-level was 70-80s the people one level below were 50-60s and on down the line. It was like a traffic jam.