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Recycling, Some corporations are smart enough,

Tap into IT's high-energy, golden oldies

By Lisa Vaas, 1999

Take a look at Doug Keltz. You'd say he looks 10 years younger than 49, wouldn't you? That's what the Silicon Valley CEO standing next to him at a cocktail party not long ago thought. It also was probably why he thought it was safe to brag about how his company doesn't employ anyone over the age of 35.

The incident took place during a difficult, seven-month bout of unemployment for Keltz, which ended in June. Here he was, having been laid off from a large wireless communications company after 12 years of senior-level design experience and five years of experience in modem design. He also had a master's degree in electrical engineering in his pocket. But, even with all that experience, and with all the talk about IT's labor shortage, Keltz wasn't fighting off job offers.

Despite an ongoing critical lack of skilled professionals, corporate IT is letting mature workers such as Keltz fall through the cracks every day. "These days, it's not like it used to be," said Keltz, in Sunnyvale, Calif. "It used to be, if you knew 80 percent of what was going on, they figured, 'Hell, this guy is smart. He'll pick up what he needs. If he needs to learn application-specific integrated circuits or whatever, fine. We'll hire him.'"

And age discrimination in IT reaches far beyond the merely anecdotal. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that there were 90,000 age discrimination lawsuits filed in 1998. The agency doesn't break those lawsuits down by industry, but just a glance at the trade journals will tell you that corporate IT has been involved in plenty of those lawsuits. Witness the suit filed last December against Siemens Energy & Automatic Inc. by 11 computer programmers, who claimed they were fired in 1997 and replaced by young programmers.

So what's changed in the world of corporate IT to bring about this state, where older IT workers feel that their jobs are going to less experienced, cheaper labor in the form of young, or foreign-born, temporary hirees? There are oft-cited reasons for this type of age discrimination, which experts say is now rampant in IT: Corporate IT managers don't want to devote the resources to retraining workers who lack up-to-date skills; they don't think older workers are flexible enough to pick up new skills; and/or they believe that older IT workers cost more in terms of health care and pension plans. Plus, for many IT managers, good-enough IT skills just aren't good enough. Many, say older IT workers, seek only candidates with up-to-the-minute skills instead of letting capable programmers learn the languages du jour on the job.

But, experts say, soon corporations are going to have to rethink both their reluctance to take time out to train and their willingness to discard older IT workers. It's simply a matter of numbers. As the work force ages and more and more workers with leg acy skills retire, corporations will need to change their tunes, said Barb Gomol ski, an analyst for Gartner Institute who is based in Fallbrook, Calif. "If you look at demographics, once the boomer generation retires, the following generation is very small," Gomolski said. "The labor situation is just going to get worse, since there are going to be lots of people retiring in the next few years."

A few savvy companies, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association—Fannie Mae—already are getting creative about finding ways to put older IT workers on the job. Some—including one of Gomolski's clients, a large insurance company that needed to beef up its year 2000 remediation staff—are sending out letters inviting retired IT employees to return. Others are instituting training programs for older IT workers and oft-ignored groups, including disabled persons or welfare-to-work candidates. And some are memorizing the phone numbers of staffing companies that specialize in placing vintage techies back into the work force. One such company is The Senior Staff Inc., in Campbell, Calif., which maintains the country's largest database of information on IT pros over the age of 35 (see graphic, right).

It's not just demographics that will force employers to look to older IT workers. Even after Y2K remediation efforts wind down, experts say, legacy systems will be around and, with them, will be a need for legacy skills. "Y2K work will dry up," Gomolski said. "But I still have plenty of clients running legacy systems. Large financial institutions run things like ATM [banking] applications, credit card processing—all those transaction-heavy, giant applications that are pretty bulletproof at this point and not easy to rewrite."

Of course, necessity is the mother of invention. Just ask Keltz about that—his phone only started to ring when, earlier this year, the H-1B visa quota that allows foreign-born workers into the United States was met. Then, Keltz said, the offers started flowing in. Fannie Mae, the federally chartered mortgage company in Washington, knows all about necessity. IT managers there have about 300 reasons to get creative about hiring practices. That's the average number of positions that open up every year in the company's 1,200-member IT work force, according to Cathy Mattax, director of CIS Business Management Services for Fannie Mae.

That ongoing need for a stream of IT candidates, as well as a desire to keep its work force diverse, prompted the company to set up its Business Systems Technologist program. This 18-week program teaches software skills such as Unix, Sybase Inc. database development, C, C++ and Apple Computer Inc.'s Web Objects to support its systems environment, which has both Web-enabled and cli ent/server technologies. Fannie Mae accepts individuals from any age or background into the program, as long as they have three years of work experience in a business environment and either an undergraduate degree or the equivalent in work experience. While the program isn't targeted solely at older workers, Mattax said, the prerequisite of three years' experience underscores the fact that the company is looking for seasoned workers to plug into its IT group.

"We're looking for individuals with prior business experience, no matter the discipline," Mattax said. "It provides a level of maturity."

Up to 60 entry-level software development workers are brought in through the program every year, Mattax said. All are the kind of workers corporate IT always says it's after. "What we have found with our program is that all our candidates are very effective employees, regardless of background and age," Mattax said. "They're trained very well, and they're very productive, regardless of age. And those 18 weeks of training makes a big difference—it creates a strong bond, which adds to their feeling of commitment to the company."

But while an organization such as Fannie Mae has the resources to provide this kind of training program, managers at many corporations say they feel that their wallets are just too pinched for that kind of investment.

One way around that is to have older workers pay for their own training. That's where an organization such as The Senior Staff can help. The placement company has created a self-training model in which older job candidates pay for their own training. The Senior Staff provides links from its site at www.srstaff.com to CBT Systems USA Ltd., a leading provider of interactive education software, and to Fatbrain.com Inc., an online bookstore that carries computer-based, video-based and Web-delivered training. After taking courses through these or other programs, some older workers get reimbursed by the corporations that later hire them. This model is attractive because the more employers can get employees to train themselves, the more money they save.

"Vintage techies have the money, time, interest and incentive to improve themselves," said Bill Payson, president of The Senior Staff. "We're also in the process of discussing a way [to link] to Manpower Inc. They have the jobs, Fatbrain has the self-training, and we have the bodies."

Of course, not all companies need to be coaxed into hiring older workers. Many companies go panning for gold in the database of The Senior Staff because they've got legacy skill needs that aren't going away any time soon. One of those companies is Computech Inc., a VAR in Rancho Cordova, Calif., that recently needed a programmer who could work in UniBasic, a Unix version of BASIC—not the kind of skill you find in a recent college graduate, by any means. Max Bandy, software manager for Computech, said The Senior Staff filled the bill when it sent 70-year-old Marshall Ihrig his way. But it wasn't just Ihrig's language skills that got Bandy's attention. It was more his mind-set.

"He's somebody with a logical mind," Bandy said. "If you put him in front of the computer, he can do just about anything. He's just one of those gifted people."

And Computech has no intention of discarding Ihrig once it's made all of its clients' programs Y2K-ready. After all, those legacy programs aren't going anywhere after they're remediated—they'll still be around, needing modifications and new programmers to work on them, for a good time to come, Bandy said. And even if all that work does dry up, Computech probably won't let Ihrig go without a fight. Instead, the company will just recycle his skills and bring him up on current languages.

"I'm going to teach him Visual Basic," Bandy said. "At age 70, I think he'll probably want to retire again some day. But in the meantime, he's been very reliable and conscientious, and he gets along with everybody. You couldn't ask for a better employee." Never let your brain retire.

But the onus isn't on corporate IT alone when it comes to getting older workers back into action. Experts say mature workers have to take it upon themselves to beat back the stereotype about older IT workers that's most widely held and seems to be the hardest to shake: that their skills have gotten rusty and they don't want to—or simply won't—keep up with changes in technology (see graphic, right).

It may be a stereotype, but it still has some basis in truth, said Jim Holder, a longtime programmer and systems designer who describes himself as an "old Neanderthal who's on the back side" of 50. "I'd say old Neanderthals fail to keep up on technology," said Holder, who is now a program manager for Alternative Resources Corp. ARC is a consultancy and staffing company that runs a program called Reach, which trains people with disabilities, older workers, veterans and welfare recipients to hold down help desk, project management and other IT jobs. Holder, who has taught college IT programs at the master's level, has always told his students that if they're resistant to change, they're dead in the water when it comes to IT careers.

"I used to tell them, 'If you're not willing to give yourself a mental enema and relearn everything you've learned, then don't get in this business,'" said Holder, in Chicago. "I'd tell them to go be a lawyer. Law doesn't change that often." This is one vintage IT worker who practices what he preaches: Holder recently attended a seminar on Web design. In addition, you'll never see him on the train without a technical book in hand for the 45-minute commute to his work. And he makes sure to take advantage of ARC's willingness to pay for training or books, as well as the company's library of training manuals and computer-based training CD-ROMs.

If mature workers don't follow Holder's example and bone up on new skills, it can mean that their résumés often wind up in the circular file, experts say.

"Older IT people better have stayed on top of things," warned Jim Spitze, a managing partner of Systems Consulting Consortium Inc., in Orinda, Calif., a company that, if anything, has age-discriminated in favor of older IT pros, Spitze said. "As time goes on, we have to stay up with the times. It's hard for us to find people in the 50-60 age range who have really solid knowledge of the Internet, Web sites and so on."

And keeping up with things means a lot more than simply taking one-day programming courses just so you can put the word "Java" on your résumé. That trick may enable a résumé to leap the hurdle of automatic résumé scanning, but it doesn't substitute for the ability to, for example, actually program in Java. (For a look at how to beat these potentially discriminatory résumé-scanning applications, see story, Page 64.) According to Spitze, job applicants have to be able to speak fluent Web language as well as to casually bandy about the comparative virtues of ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors.

"[In interviews, they'll be asked], Do they know what's happening with the Internet, Web sites, telecommunications technology, business applications?" Spitze said. "[They'll be expected to know] what's happening with major ERP vendors. They should be able to compare and contrast SAP vs. Oracle vs. Baan vs. J.D. Edwards vs. whomever. If they can't, they haven't stayed up with IT, and they're going to drift into a second-tier mode." Can corporate IT get them back?

So, if corporate IT gets over its preconceptions about older workers, will the profession be able to lure the best and brightest among them back into the fold? Not automatically, some say. "Well, if the right job comes along, and if they hang the right price tag on it, corporate IT may get me back," Holder conceded. But getting somebody like Holder back in action full-time may not be all that easy. It will take a flexible approach to work hours and perhaps a willingness to create part-time positions, experts say. After all, Holder's wife gets four weeks of vacation, and it would be ungentlemanly if he were so busy working that he couldn't escort her. "I don't want to leave anybody in the lurch while I'm skiing in Vail," he said.

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