As a boss I try to do everything I can to nurture young talent in my staff and to encourage career development, which is not always easy in a small charitable foundation like Cumberland Lodge where people tend to stay put because they enjoy their work and have put down roots in the area. Last Tuesday’s moving of the goalposts, which makes it impossible for me to ask a colleague to leave on grounds of age, presents a bit of a challenge therefore.One of my predecessors as Principal of the Lodge, who lives close by, will be one hundred years old next year and I wonder if in fairness I should ask him to resume the reins. That’s a joke, in case it is taken literally, but I do feel, as a man on the wrong side of 65 but who still feels he has a few of his marbles, that my right to stay on is in dispute with my requirement to encourage the next generation. I think I know the solution for me personally, but I am less sure that I know what it is nationally, so to speak.
Young people can easily get blocked in their career trajectory. Ask any German academic what it is like to work in a department where the professors have hierarchical security and you will know what I mean. Yet the Government’s legislation must be right, even if one suspects that it has been introduced as much out of concern for reducing pensions as to outlaw ageism per se. It is clearly nonsense to insist that a competent worker stop working on age grounds alone.One welcomes the change in the law, even while one anguishes for younger employeeswhose aspirations it will often block.
Perhaps in the future the answer will have to lie in some enforced work-life balance. Three days on, three days off, and one to praise the Lord maybe?Until we get there I shall go on a bit longer, knowing that the law is protecting me but avoiding too much eye contact with colleagues half my age. The danger is that I won’t recognise when age has withered me and custom staled my perhaps not so infinite variety. That’s when I hope these younger colleagues, with their clear complexions and eager manners, will don their white coats and march me off to the care home.
Alastair Niven
Principal
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