We’re in the midst of one of the most challenging job markets we’ve seen in decades, and unfortunately, it seems to be even tougher if you’re middle-aged.
Social media is full of stories from people in their 40s and 50s who’ve applied for jobs they’re more than qualified for, only to hear absolutely nothing back. Or worse, received an almost instant ‘thanks, but no thanks’ automated rejection.
Then there are those who’ve been passed over for promotions in favour of someone with half their experience. And if you’re an experienced corporate worker, perhaps you’ve noticed that opportunities seem to be landing on the desks of younger colleagues rather than yours.
When you see enough of this, you can’t help but wonder whether age has something to do with it.
It’s a confronting thought when you’ve spent 20 or 25 years building a career. You’d expect all that experience to make you more valuable to employers, so why does it sometimes feel like it’s working against you?
There’s plenty of talk about ageism at work, particularly for people in their 40s and 50s, and increasingly even those in their late 30s. But how much of a problem is it, really? Is it getting worse, or has it always been this way? And is it actually about age, or are employers simply becoming less willing to pay what experienced professionals cost?
Yes, age discrimination at work is very real
The research is surprisingly conclusive. Age discrimination is a genuine problem in corporate workplaces.
We’ve all heard stories about experienced professionals struggling to find work in their late 40s and 50s, or being overlooked in favour of younger colleagues. It’s easy to attribute these experiences to other factors, such as suitability for the role or salary expectations. After all, proving that age was the reason someone didn’t get a job is notoriously difficult.
Researchers have found a way to test this by sending employers fictitious job applications with comparable qualifications and experience, changing only the indicators of the applicant's age. Across these experiments, older applicants were less likely to receive positive responses, providing compelling evidence that age can influence recruitment decisions.
We also have evidence that age discrimination extends well beyond recruitment. Research published this year by Diversity Council Australia and the Australian Human Rights Commission identifies age-related disadvantage within workplaces, including unequal access to professional development and mentoring, alongside assumptions about older employees’ capabilities.
While individual hiring decisions can involve many factors, the broader evidence establishes pretty decisively that age discrimination is a real and measurable problem.
What really surprised me is how early it can begin. We tend to associate ageism with people approaching retirement, however some research suggests recruitment disadvantage can emerge in your 40s, particularly for women.
This is quite a disturbing finding when you consider that many professionals are at the height of their capabilities at this age, with decades of accumulated knowledge and potentially another 20 years of working life ahead of them.
Is the problem getting worse?
If you’re paying attention to the growing conversation about age discrimination, particularly on social media, you might think that corporate ageism is a relatively recent problem, or one that’s becoming increasingly widespread.
In reality, age discrimination has been documented for decades. Researchers have studied its effects extensively, and governments around the world have introduced legislation to address it. Australia, for example, has had federal laws prohibiting age discrimination since 2004.
It’s less clear whether the problem is getting worse. Greater public awareness doesn’t necessarily indicate a rise in discrimination. It may simply reflect a growing willingness to recognise and discuss experiences that previously went unchallenged.
Some Australian research even suggests that employers have become more receptive to hiring older workers over time, at least according to surveys of HR professionals. Of course, self-reported attitudes don’t always reflect actual recruitment decisions, particularly when discrimination is involved.
So while we can’t really establish that corporate ageism is becoming more prevalent, what I think warrants closer examination is whether the factors influencing employers’ decisions about experienced workers are changing.
Is it age, or is it money?
Discussions about ageism often focus on familiar stereotypes - older workers struggle to adapt to new technology, or lack the motivation to learn new skills. These assumptions certainly influence how employers view experienced professionals, but I suspect another factor plays a significant role in corporate hiring decisions: money.
Someone who’s spent 20 or 25 years building their career will reasonably expect a salary that reflects their experience. Compare that with a professional who has five or ten years behind them and might accept considerably less for a similar role. The appeal is obvious for employers looking to reduce costs.
The Australian HR Institute and Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2025 Older and Younger Workers Report provides some insight. Of the HR professionals surveyed, 32% cited high salary expectations as a barrier to hiring older workers, while 28% pointed to candidates having too much experience (honestly, I do wonder if “too much experience” is just a softer way of saying “too expensive).
These findings don’t prove that salary costs drive age discrimination, but they suggest employers weigh experience against its financial cost when making hiring decisions. There’s also an important distinction between rejecting a candidate because their salary expectations exceed the budget, and making assumptions about their suitability based on age.
Still, the findings raise an uncomfortable question about how much employers are willing to pay for experience, particularly as technology changes the skills organisations need and how they value them.
When AI gets involved in recruitment
Recruitment technology adds another dimension to the age discrimination debate, particularly as employers increasingly rely on automated systems to process job applications.
You’ve probably heard about the Workday case, a significant age discrimination lawsuit currently before the US courts. The applicant alleges that Workday’s recruitment technology discriminated against jobseekers based on characteristics including age, after he received repeated rejections from employers using the software.
Workday denies the allegations, and the courts have yet to establish whether its technology unlawfully discriminated against applicants.
Nevertheless, the case raises important questions about the growing role of technology in recruitment. Most jobseekers will know how it works these days - you find a vacancy, upload a CV, spend another 20 minutes entering information that’s already in the CV, then wait for a response. Sometimes an automated rejection arrives almost immediately.
Automated screening helps employers manage large volumes of applications, but it also introduces potential risks. A system trained on historical recruitment data could reproduce hiring patterns that favoured younger candidates. Similarly, software that uses career histories or qualifications as screening criteria could inadvertently disadvantage applicants of certain ages.
In either scenario, employers could find themselves perpetuating existing discrimination, even when no one at the company has explicitly instructed their systems to favour younger workers. For experienced professionals, that raises the frustrating possibility of losing opportunities before a human recruiter has even considered their achievements.
The key takeaway from the Workday case for me is that companies need to understand how their recruitment technology evaluates candidates and monitor whether it produces discriminatory outcomes. Automating part of the hiring process doesn’t absolve an organisation of responsibility for the decisions it makes.
What “cheaper” actually costs
There’s another side to the argument that experienced workers cost too much, and that’s what companies stand to lose when they replace them with someone younger and presumably cheaper.
For businesses under pressure to reduce costs, it might be an attractive proposition. However, the calculation overlooks much of what experienced professionals bring to the table, particularly those skills that are a little harder to capture and describe in a job description.
Someone who’s spent 15 or 20 years in an industry brings knowledge that rarely appears in a job description. They understand how organisations make decisions and recognise potential problems early. They can draw on past experience to resolve issues before they escalate.
I certainly trust my professional judgement far more today than I did ten years ago. Experience has made it easier to recognise problems and work out how to solve them, often drawing on lessons I couldn’t have learned any other way. For most of us, that knowledge takes years to develop and can be difficult to transfer to someone earlier in their career.
Research supports the commercial value of retaining experienced employees. An Australian study that followed a technical organisation over five years found that losing experienced workers and their organisational knowledge contributed to slower task completion and longer periods for replacement employees to develop competence - which ultimately impacted productivity.
Similarly, a 2025 study published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory identified an association between the departure of experienced managers and delays in US federal government IT projects.
For employers, the financial calculation needs to account for the value of accumulated knowledge and the potential consequences of losing it. An experienced employee might command a higher salary, but preventing even one costly mistake could more than justify the difference.
Where AI fits in
Finally, where does AI adoption fit into the debate about older employees in corporate workplaces?
In a widely cited study, researchers Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond examined the impact of AI assistance on more than 5,000 customer support workers. They found that AI increased productivity by approximately 14% on average, with newer and less skilled employees recording the largest gains. More experienced workers saw much smaller improvements.
For employers, these findings are probably going to raise questions about how much they need to pay for certain skills. If AI allows someone with two years of experience to perform tasks that previously required five, companies may have good reason to reconsider how they structure roles and reward employees.
However, the study focused on customer support work, and its findings don’t establish that AI can replace expertise in more complex professional roles.
AI can produce technically correct answers without understanding whether they’re appropriate for a particular situation. I’ve encountered this in my own work, where AI has suggested solutions that make sense on paper, but would be impractical in a real corporate environment. Experienced professionals draw on their understanding of organisational context and the likely consequences of decisions to make judgements that go well beyond completing individual tasks.
I think it’s reasonable to conclude that AI is going to change what employers value in experienced workers. Some capabilities that once took years to develop could become more accessible to less experienced employees. At the same time, professional discernment and the ability to anticipate consequences may become increasingly valuable.
Employers need to recognise that distinction before assuming that making certain tasks cheaper also reduces the value of the people who have spent years mastering their profession.
What you can do about it
Age discrimination is an employer problem, and you shouldn’t have to compensate for unfair assumptions about your age. Even the most qualified candidates can encounter discrimination. That being said, there are practical steps you can take to strengthen your position, many of which align with expert recommendations.
Keep your skills relevant. You probably have enough professional development certificates to last several lifetimes, so there’s no need to collect more for the sake of it. Instead, consider how your industry is changing, particularly with AI, and identify one or two capabilities worth developing. Focus on applying those skills so you can demonstrate their value to prospective employers.
Show what your experience is worth. Employers want to understand what you can contribute to their business. Rather than relying on your career history to speak for itself, highlight the problems you’ve solved and the commercial outcomes you’ve delivered. This becomes particularly important when employers might perceive your experience as expensive.
Think carefully before accepting less money. Taking a lower salary can make sense if you’re changing careers or deliberately seeking a less demanding role. However, there’s no guarantee that reducing your salary expectations will improve your employment prospects, and a substantial pay cut can have lasting consequences for your earnings and retirement planning.
Develop alternatives while you’re still employed. Consulting, contracting or starting a business could offer another way to use your experience. Self-employment comes with financial risks, but you can explore the possibilities without immediately giving up the security of your current job. Having made the transition myself, I feel particularly strongly about the value of developing options before you need them.
Know your rights. Many countries have laws protecting workers against age discrimination, although the protections and complaint processes vary. If you suspect discrimination, keep records of relevant conversations, employment decisions and feedback. Familiarise yourself with the laws that apply where you work and seek advice early, as some complaints have strict deadlines.
Your career shouldn’t have an expiry date
Unfortunately, the evidence leaves little doubt that age discrimination remains a serious problem in corporate workplaces. With many professionals in their 40s and 50s still facing another 15 or 20 years of working life, its consequences extend well beyond individual hiring decisions.
We need to keep the pressure on companies to challenge their assumptions about experienced workers and examine whether their hiring practices, including the technology behind them, perpetuate age discrimination.
For those of us navigating the second half of our careers, there’s also value in thinking about what comes next and building options that give us greater control over our working lives.
Everyone deserves the opportunity to keep doing meaningful work and earning a decent living for as long as they choose. If you’ve spent decades building a career, you shouldn’t have to wonder whether your experience has become the very thing holding you back.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
I’ve been thinking about the recent announcements around workforce cuts from Microsoft, Barclays, Canva and NAB, and what it says about corporate priorities when highly profitable companies announce thousands of job cuts.
I understand that businesses need to adapt and that profitability doesn’t guarantee every role will remain necessary, however I do think we should be asking much harder questions about the justification for these decisions, particularly when companies are making billions in profit.
How much of the work is genuinely disappearing - and how much will simply land on the desks of the people left behind? At what point should companies be held accountable for the wider consequences of cutting jobs to improve their financial performance?
While I’ve touched on this a little before, I want to revisit it next week - including whether we’ve become far too accepting of profitable companies treating mass redundancies as business as usual. If you’ve been affected by layoffs at a company that was still making substantial profits, I’d love to hear about your experience. Drop me an email and we’ll connect.
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