Another pandemic effect

More Older Workers Are Retiring

and Dropping out of the Labor Market

By Mitchell Schnurman at dallasnews.com

When spring break ended last March, teacher Gay Leigh Bingham never returned to the classroom at Seagoville High School, and she still hasn’t gone back…

    After 18 years of teaching agriculture science and biology, she elected to retire and work with horses at her Broken Bow Ranch in Seagoville. She offers trail rides and riding lessons to customers, and has time to breed and train horses for sale — work she long wanted to do.
 

COVID-19 and the Future of Aging: Workforce Trends

The challenges and opportunities for them due to the pandemic

by Art Bilger at nextavenue.org

On the surface, the pandemic is creating more challenges than opportunities for older workers, particularly low-income workers.

    Higher-income workers are often in knowledge-based positions, as opposed to labor-based. And as we have seen, these knowledge-based jobs more readily adapt to the remote working that has kept many people employed since March.
 

An employee of a fast food restaurant in Florida received the tip of a lifetime.

    Joe Decicco showed up for work and was greeted by strangers who consider themselves friends. The 70-year-old who has been at the restaurant for 20 years is fondly called “Taco Bell Joe.”

    Tricia Phillippi created a Facebook group to spotlight local restaurants and staff during the pandemic. Members of the group decided to vote for a favorite employee and Decicco won “by a landslide.” The initial gift of $50 soon swelled to thousands.

Joe Decicco

NiftyNews will not be published on Friday, December 25 due to the Christmas holiday. NiftyNews will return on Monday, December 28. We hope you and yours have a safe, healthy and happy holiday.

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A parting note:

    As we prepare to leave the most trying year in recent memory and as we begin to tackle 2021, let us remember the words of Kevin Cusack:

  Stay positive.   Test negative.
 

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A common question that is often asked in job interviews says, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Fair enough.

    Presumably the interviewers who ask that question want to discover not only what are your future plans, but do you have the ability to forecast things for yourself in the coming years. It’s a common tactic that many job interviewers employ and it’s a question that the prepared job candidate is ready to answer.

    At this point in time however, it seems somewhat silly. How many job seekers in 2015 could have foreseen where they were over the past 12 months? Who could have even remotely predicted what we’ve all experienced during the year that is mercifully drawing to a close?

    When seen through the lens of 2020, it illustrates the fragility and unpredictability of the job market.

    Several years ago a savvy job-market watcher noted that the four most in-demand technology jobs that year didn’t even exist when that year’s college graduates were leaving high school. Given that degree of volatility, who possibly hope to prepare those graduates for the changes the job market wrought during those four years?

    Yet that doesn’t stop politicians and academic leaders from boasting about they are planning to meet the job market demands of tomorrow. How could they possibly conceive of working to meet demands that no one knows exist?

    Where does that leave the age 50-plus job seeker? Sitting pretty when you think about it. When the precise nature of the future job market is as unknown and unpredictable as it actually is, the most sought after job candidates will be those who have fine honed basic skills and workplace experience. 

    For they will be the best prepared job candidates in the market.