Encore entrepreneurship is the best revenge for highly experienced professionals facing ageism.
Linkedin promotes ageism by requiring dates for work experience. Articles then advise older users to limit what they include in their profiles (and on their resumes) to address profiling roadblocks — which is both disingenuous and demeaning. That’s hypocritical at best.
Many who are only in their 60’s have had long careers that are still value-adding by any definition. Technology never made my experience irrelevant. I kept pace with every innovation, finetuning my expertise and my business to capitalize on change. That’s how I remained successful and my profile and resume tells that story.
Why should any of us feel forced to limit our profiles to 15 years of work history as many articles ‘advise’ us to do when our accomplishments often created or changed industries? A mindset that knows how to ignite and capitalize on innovation improves with experience and perspective.
Advising highly experienced professionals to downplay dates also fails to acknowledge that recruiters go to Linkedin to verify details or, more likely, get a feel for an applicant’s age. Dates traditionally established credibility (which worked against talented younger applicants). Now they are used to weed out older candidates, essentially diminishing the value of a career’s worth of accomplishments, impact and success.
All of this is incredibly short-sighted and yet another reason why the next wave of successful startups will be driven by highly experienced encore entrepreneurs who are #notdone and definitely #notmyfirstrodeo.
Don’t change yourself to adapt to ageism. Create (even greater) success in spite of it.
