Australian employers seem to be having a change of heart when it comes to hiring older workers.

While age discrimination has been identified as a major threat to sustained economic growth, 93 per cent of respondents to our last Beilby Rewards survey said they would be willing to hire employees over the age of 55. However, one in three employers admitted to having overlooked mature age job applicants in the past.

Figures released this month by the Australian Productivity Commission show that Australia’s population is aging faster than predicted. By the early 2020s, more people are expected to retire from the labour force than will join it. Within 40 years, approximately double the number of people, or 25 per cent of the population, will be aged 65 and over.

In the past five years, skill shortages and an aging population have encouraged employers to challenge entrenched stereotypes in they same way they did decades ago when women demanded greater participation in the workforce.

Negative perceptions of older workers range from a view that they are behind the times in their profession, are less motivated, more conservative, unwilling to be re-trained or unable to cope with new technology and computers. Further, detractors claim mature-age employees are usually risk averse, resistant to change, less creative and have higher rates of absenteeism.

The belief that workplace performance declines substantially with increasing age is largely unsupported by research evidence. It is also unsupported by most Beilby Rewards members, 74 per cent of whom said they believed mature workers were just as productive as other staff, with 21 per cent saying older workers were more productive and only 5 per cent reporting them to be less productive than their younger colleagues.

Negative stereotypes about older workers effectively deny organisations access to a potentially valuable resource. The performance of skilled and semi-skilled employees has been shown to peak in their late 30s and early 40s, declining only gradually afterwards, with the effect that the productivity of workers over the age of 50 often outstrips the performance of workers under the age of 30. This is particularly true for jobs that involve a substantial amount of training and experience.

When asked if they had ever actively encouraged a mature worker to stay on in the company rather than retire it was a line ball decision for Rewards survey respondents, 52% of whom said yes and 48% said no.