2023

What does it take to ensure that older workers have equal access to today’s open jobs?

CWI Labs and WorkingNation present a look at workers at the intersection of age, race, and gender
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Editor’s note: This article was originally published March 22, 2023. This update reflects new content added on May 17, including a guide for employers on best practices in engaging older workers in the workforce.

Older workers are critical to our nation’s labor force. In April, nearly 25% of all U.S. workers – 37.2 million – were over the age of 55. Six out of 10 (61%) of those workers were women of color.

Since the seismic economic shock initiated by COVID in March 2020, our workforce has regained many workers forced out of work by shut-down triggered layoffs. Employers have added 3,302,000 jobs to their payrolls over the past three years, but older adults are still struggling to get back into the workforce in meaningful, good-paying jobs.

One in five of the long-term unemployed – people looking for work for six months of longer – are over the age of 55, according to the latest BLS statistics.

Sixty-one (61%) of older workers say they believe they’ve been denied a job because of their age, while 25% of Black and Hispanic workers report being discriminated against in the workplace.

At many turns, ageism, racism, sexism, and an overall lack of access to upskilling programs are coming together to create barriers to economic opportunity for older workers.

These workers and job seekers are being overlooked and sidelined.

So, what does it take to ensure that older workers have equal access to the training and skills they need to thrive in today’s workforce?

CWI Labs and WorkingNation take an in-depth look at that question in our digital magazine Overlooked and Sidelined: Workers at the Intersection of Age, Race, and Gender.

“The exclusion of older Americans from opportunities for good, life-sustaining jobs within the workforce is not only a moral and an economic issue, it is one of the most important civil rights issues of our time,” write Gary Officer, founder and CEO of CWI Labs, and Art Bilger, founder and CEO of WorkingNation, in a joint letter introducing the magazine.

“This year, absorbing older workers back into the workforce will require a fundamental re-evaluation of our workforce priorities and a willingness to embrace the many talents – and skills – embedded within this segment of the workforce, as well as a continuing acknowledgement in hiring practices that age is just a number,” the letter continues.

Overlooked and Sideline outlines the state of the older worker in post-pandemic America, examining some of the issues that have created the barriers to employment. We also celebrate the attributes an older worker brings to the job.

We also look at solutions, including programs and initiatives that are making a difference to older workers today. The multimedia magazine features interviews with Jane Oates, president of WorkingNation, and Angela Beddoe, publisher and editor-in-chief of HERLIFE magazine, as well as the chair of the CWI Labs.

May is Older Americans Month. We take this opportunity to share with you a new guide – Age is Now a Strategic Imperative: An Employers Guide to Engaging Older Workers from the Encore Network – which summarizes the policies and practices that age-friendly employers are implementing and the resulting benefits.

Changing the Narrative – a NextFifty Initiative campaign – has used the month of May as a time to address ending ageism in society. This year, the theme is “Aging Unbound.” To share the message of how work, health, culture, and society, as a whole, could be impacted with an end to ageism, the organization has created a series of short videos, which you can watch in the magazine.

You can also watch panels from the Equity Summit 2022 in Washington, DC, late last year. You’ll hear from Mark Morial of the Urban League, Ramsey Alwin of the National Council on Aging, David Kim of the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, Paul Irving of the Milken Institute, and many others.

We invite you to read, listen, and watch Overlooked and Sidelined here and we encourage you to share it with your network.

Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.