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During the last six months, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to prepare over-50 workers for the economic reset after COVID-19. Surprisingly, few of them are aware of the paradigm shift that has already taken place in the fundamental approach to getting work done far beyond the preponderance of remote (work from home) arrangements to the escalation of required technical knowledge to carry out the most mundane tasks. Traditionally, Baby Boomers struggle with technology. In corporate America, Baby Boomers are perceived as un-coachable, set in their ways, and expecting a high salary to reflect their traditional perception of seniority and self-worth. Even if a well-financed Baby Boomer entrepreneur bought an existing technology company, the decision-makers he ultimately pitched as potential clients would be in their early 30s, silently harboring the negative profile of another gray-haired, left-behind old-timer, out of his element.
The challenges that over-50 workers will soon face are not just in technology. Some companies went out of business and are not coming back. Some departments downsized and developed relationships with outside vendors. In many instances, these relationships will prove to be less employee/fixed costs/benefit/ retirement intensive and therefore continued at the expense of older workers who are almost always laid off first.
This leads to the crux of the matter, a massive transformation from wage income to ownership income. Not being able to get rehired, over-50 workers will have to become over-50 entrepreneurs.
The problem is these new business owners will have to know themselves in order to choose a compatible business niche. Most of them don’t. For years, they have operated under a system of action-oriented rewards. On a daily basis, often relinquishing their own opinion and biting your tongue, they have carried out certain premeditated actions to please their boss and secure their job. This could have been something as trivial as getting back from lunch precisely on time, or laughing at the district manager‘s stale jokes, or attending the CEO’s annual company picnic.
These were survival techniques that kept a target off their backs and food on your table. But, as a business owner, these techniques will be of little value.
This is what I’ve been working on … transitioning their mind from a worker’s mentality to an owner’s mentality. In conjunction with this effort, I’ve started an Over-50 Entrepreneurial Master Group on Facebook. This is my passion. More on this later.
-Leander Jackie Grogan-