Everywhere I turn there are old people who have been laid off complaining about age discrimination and how their years of experience are ignored in favor of younger workers. This is a complete reversal of what my peers have experienced as they being to enter the workforce in their post-college lives. To them, employers are only looking for experienced workers and are unwilling to put the effort into training newly minted college graduates. So which of these perspectives is grounded in data?
So let’s look at the employment rates first. The graph below is of the monthly unemployment rate (seasonally unadjusted) from 2007 to 2011 by age groups 20-24 and 25-29 to represent the younger age cohorts and 45-54 and 55+ to represent the older age cohorts.
*Raw data attached at bottom of post
As you can see from the general curves, the unemployment rates for every age group has fluctuated in the same relative direction. So, everyone is getting impacted pretty evenly, and in general older age groups have lower unemployment than younger age groups. One interesting thing to note is that unemployment has basically plateaued since 2009, nearly 2 years ago.
Now let’s look and see if those numbers have translated into any shifts in the composition of the unemployed population by age.
Again, the differences in pre-recession 2007 vs July 2011 are minimal. So this reiterates that as a whole, unemployment has been hitting all age groups pretty evenly.
Conclusion, it sucks out there. If you’re a newly graduated young adult or a newly laid off professional, there’s no time to keep wallowing in what you perceive to be discrimination whether because you’re too old or too young. This stagnation in employment is hitting young and old fairly evenly, and it doesn’t look like things are getting much better.