The pressures of global competition, corporate acquisitions and mergers, restructurings and plant relocations, cost-reductions, executive bonuses based on the bottom-line, etc., does not bode well for older, higher salary engineers. IEEE-USA is well aware of this. Mark Twain said that when he was 15, he thought his father was the most ignorant man on the face of the earth. So he ran away from home to work on a Mississippi steamboat. He returned at 25, and was "amazed to find out how much the old man had learned in 10 years." Too much of the discussion about age discrimination in our profession misses Twain's point. I hear it all the time -- older electrical engineers' skills are out of date, their salary demands are too high, IT workers as young as 35 want a life outside the job so they are not as "reliable" as younger workers. As the U.S. career services and public policy arm of the IEEE, with 230,000 U.S. members to represent, we are working to counter these false impressions. Our ongoing efforts on behalf of older members include: IEEE-USA's Older Workers Initiative, begun by 1999 President Paul Kostek; the Age Discrimination page on our Website, and the Older Workers Survey that is now in the field, with results due in June . But why should younger IEEE members care about age discrimination? Consider what those who deny the serious evidence of age discrimination, particularly in IT, are really saying. I don't believe that as a group, older engineers have failed to keep up their skills. We all know that, as Twain might have put it, book learning isn't the same as job experience. Our profession changes so fast that, because we are a profession, being an electrical engineer means that you have to stay current to survive. What those who claim that older workers must be out of touch are really saying, is that the IT industries are a short career. Get in at 25, get out by 40, and do something else for the rest of your life. If you can. That is where the IEEE-USA, your advocate, comes in. We don't accept that our profession is a throw-away career. We believe continual improvement is vital. And we know that the value an engineer adds to our economy and our society grows with experience. Those who have now turned 40, 50 or older have the immeasurable benefit of keeping their skills current through one of the most profound periods of accelerating technology in history. Those who are 29 today will be 39 and 49 a lot sooner than they might think. Programmers whose newly-minted skills are in Java and Linux might keep in mind that, 20 years ago, the newly-minted skills were C and C++. What happened to COBOL and Fortran will happen to Java, too, and the same arguments might be heard again. "Y2K graduates with computer degrees are out of date," someone may claim in 2020. "Nobody does Java anymore, and Linux has moved parsecs since the invention of Digital Oxygen. We need younger workers who can do voice-response programming in Chinese..." Twain was right, if these changes occur, some who deny the obvious evidence of age discrimination now will be amazed to discover how far ahead of its time IEEE-USA was. But we're not going to let that happen, because we're already fighting for older workers -- and younger ones -- right now. | Top of Page | Intro to IEEE-USA | President's Column | IEEE-USA | Last Updated: 10 May 2000 |
