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Working 9 to 5 (or longer), what a way to make a living, as the song goes. But a new study reveals that employees over 35 are more likely to find the daily grind all taking and no giving.
Bloomberg reports that a survey by human resource firm Robert Half U.K., which polled more than 2,000 U.K. employees, found that older workers are less happy in their jobs than their younger counterparts. One in six British workers over age 35 said they were unhappy. Nearly a third of people over 55 said they didn't feel appreciated at work.
Jean Prince started working for a U.K. tech company when she was 50. Although she felt lucky to be employed, she was not satisfied in the job. The workplace has become more impersonal and tougher, she told Bloomberg. Everyone is performance-managed to death.
For six years, Johanna Bodnyk worked at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University as a culture and communications coordinator. She began to notice her friends were all getting married and starting families, which prompted her to reevaluate her working life. Once you get a little more stable and settled in, you then look around and ask whether you actually enjoy it, she said. At age 34, Bodnyk switched careers and learned how to code.
In the U.S., almost 19 percent of people 65 or older are working at least part-time, according to a jobs report released in the second quarter of 2017. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in 2024, one in four people in the labor market will be 55 or older.
According to a poll by U.K. skill development organization City & Guilds Group, a fifth of older British workers don't believe their employers value staff of all ages equally. A third of workers over 55 feel overlooked in favor of younger staff, Capita Resourcing reports.
Older employees may be feeling similarly in the U.S., and for good reason. James Harter, chief scientist for workplace management at Gallup, says there is a growing desire by employers to recruit millennials. We have a new breed of workers with different expectations than boomers, Harter told CBS News. They're seeking a career, not just a job.
To that end, many companies are making changes like getting rid of yearly performance reviews in favor of frequent check-ins between workers and managers. These check-ins allow for regular give and take in the hopes of increasing worker motivation.
Harter says millennials are looking for jobs that allow them to do what they do best, and higher pay is secondary to a sense of purpose. The concerns of older workers tend to be vastly different. There comes a time when either you haven't achieved success, work has burned you out, or lived experience tells you family is more important, Cary Cooper, a workplace researcher at Manchester Business School, told Bloomberg. You ask yourself: 'What am I doing this for?'