Posted on April 30, 2019 By Judy Tan Editor Pick 2, Purpose

In a world where we want value in our products and services,
it is any wonder we want the same thing from our employees?

If you can hire a perfectly healthy person at 22 to handle a
manual labor job with the goal of having the person continue in that role
possibly for next 20 years more in your company, why would you hire a person at
65 to do the same, especially if the older person has higher income
expectations due to greater family needs?

Obviously, employers rarely hire a worker to do the same job
for the next 20 years. They expect people to grow – learn how to take on
different responsibilities. When we create a forklift, we expect the worker to
learn how to operate it to move more boxes and do it more quickly. Leading
growth companies know this and are becoming “Continuous Improvement Learning Organizations
(CILOs), where growth goals are an intrinsic part of each employee’s job
description, review and reward system. Thus, the job changes and/or the
employee advances (promotion) to a new role.

What’s missing in a standard job application and often job
interview, is that we’re looking for employees with the interest and capabilities
of growing. Sure they have to have the technical (hard) skills for the job; but
they also have to have the “soft” skills – knowing how to collaborate,
communicate and forge effective teams aligned with corporate goals. Research
shows that finding people with the right “soft” skills is harder than finding
people with the right hard skills.

They need a “growth” mindset as Carol Dweck called it. This means learning how to constantly improve, rather than blaming failures onoutside forces, they focus on what they can do differently to succeed. Thesepeople have “growth” skills such as grit and resilience – “stick-with-itness”and the ability to bounce back. They have wisdom – they’ve learned what thingswork best and which don’t and apply it to the new job.

When you look at people who are working after 65, including
entrepreneurs, judges (e.g., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86) and Corporate Directors
(e.g., Carl Icahn, 83), you realize that each of them is valuable because they
have expertise and experiences that provide the wisdom with which to make
better decisions. We call these people SharExers
– people who focus their value as a willingness to share wisdom and insights
based on expertise and experience.

Therefore the question facing people looking for jobs as
they get older and is whether they can demonstrate to prospective employers that
they are SharExers. With their growth mind-set, they build upon their expertise
and experience to provide increased valuable to the employer than someone
without.

Unfortunately, traditional chronological job resumes do not
highlight a SharExer’s strength, Nor do the traditional interview approach. To
learn more about how to reposition yourself as a SharExer, contact us at
success@SharExer.com.

Added by Judy Tan on April 30, 2019.
Saved under Editor Pick 2, Purpose