The Issues that Limit Older Adults from Furthering Their Career

Ebony Gray

Adult Learning
Letitia Arruda
American Pubic University
August 30, 2013

The Issues that Limit Older Adults from Furthering Their Career

In today’s society, we face many struggles that are not capable of being fixed. As adults grow into older age, their will become more negative issues that will overcome the older adults and refrain these individuals from being able to further a career of choice. Many challenges will come with aging including their independence being loss and independence is one great potential needed that is a part of the process. Independence can reflect on an adult that becomes older of age within years whose physical ability has been diminished as well as discrimination against their age. However, there are many more challenges that the elderly will face later on in life but it does not mean that these individuals have to enter old age minus their dignity. For older adults who live longer than 50 years of age, the likelihood of these individuals participating in the work force tends to drop lower in rate. Many older adults remain highly with sufficiency while other older adults may require more care and this may be due to senescence. Senescence refers to the aging process that includes biological, emotional, social, intellectual, as well as spiritual changes Senescence also has a great impact which can lead to older adults not being able to function or maintain the career or position that they already possess. One major issue that limits an individual with older age is Ageism which is known to be fairly common. Ageism is a form of discrimination, another term would be acts on prejudice, that is based on a individuals age and is known for in all cultures. Age discrimination is based on one of the aspect of discrimination of employment that is strictly prohibit which falls under the federal age Discrimination in Employment Act that was enacted during the year of 1967 (Burnett, 2012). Ageist attitudes and biases based on stereotypes causes the elderly individuals to inferior as well as limiting positions (Iweins, Desmette, Yzerbyt, & Stinglhamber, 2013). This is a very severe issue that has caused major problems in the workplace, healthcare facilities as well as inside of assisted living facilitations. Researchers from the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology quoted that “Despite the prevalence of ageism in the workplace, little empirical effort has been devoted to analyzing the contextual factors that may help reduce it (Iweins, Desmette, Yzerbyt, & Stinglhamber, 2013)”. This is in fact a true statement because there has not been any recent recovery concerning ageism. The use of ageism can affect the older individuals such as causing their jobs or careers to be lost due to the fact that most employers would like the elderly to remove themselves from the work field and allow the younger adults to gain the experience. According to the Desert News, written by Curt Burnett, stated that the age-discrimination in Utah is rising severely as well as it affecting the nation due to more reported incidents that have occurred recent which is the primary reason for the increase is. A recent story that occurred in Utah was dealing with an older age individual, who is a male of the age 65, that has been looking for a high level position over seven months now during this economic crisis as well as the recession and stock market collapse eviscerated his 401(k) also his stock holdings. This individual claimed of submitting applications for which he felt he was qualified for, due to his experience, received emails turning him down for the position or no calls at all. This was due to his age as well as the employer choosing younger individuals who have just entered in to workforce (Burnett, 2012).
According to the statistics that was received from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission