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As the federal government grapples with the issues of employment faced by an aging population, some mature workers are finding a lucrative market for their skills online.
Online outsourcing company Airtasker recently reported a huge surge in the number of older members, with the company saying older workers are posting and completing more jobs than any other age group on the site.
The Sydney-based company – which connects individuals and businesses to skilled workers who offer services that range from lining up in a queue and moving furniture to running errands overseas and picking up engagement rings – initially thought its services would be more popular with Gen Y, but has found younger and older people flock to the site in equal numbers.
The older workers, however, are the ones getting much of the attention on the site, with high task completion rates and reviews for their services.
Airtasker’s co-founder and CEO, Tim Fung, says the success of this age-bracket reflects a strong work ethic and years of accumulated experience.
“We’ve got people with fantastic experience listing on the site, there’s an ex-Silicon Valley engineer and an ex-SMCG marketer,” Fung says in an interview with Startup Smart.
“Most of the users of the site are very digitally savvy and know how to promote themselves.”
Fung says they actually they noticed the growth in older Australians signing up to Airtasker about six months after it launched and at first thought it was an anomaly, assuming more young people would be keen to get some extra cash from the odd jobs listed there.
But the growing number of older people looking to stay in the workforce, combined with a lack of superannuation and other financial pressures, has seen mature workers win over the people posting their odd jobs on the site.
The Ageing Population
While this trend is relatively new, it is also likely to increase over time as more people in this age group look for additional income or ongoing work.
According to government data, over the next four decades in Australia, the number of people aged over 65 will almost double.
“Within just seven years, about 85 percent of labour market growth will come from people over the age of 45,” the Queensland Department of Justice website says, outlining the fact that “our ageing population is a reality.”
“Economic wellbeing, for both governments and individual businesses, depends on keeping older workers employed,” the department says, but adds that “employers (many of them mature-aged themselves) have tended to be unconcerned about losing the skills, knowledge and experience of older workers.”
While it is illegal to discriminate against people based on their age, younger workers are usually “the winners in most company recruitment drives”.
In fact, the Age Discrimination Commissioner has said that age discrimination costs the Australian economy about $11 billion a year – a number that could rise as this demographic grows.
Add to that the fact that research has shown Baby Boomers and older workers are financially unprepared for retirement and, while the government is pushing for older workers to stay in employment for longer (as a way of reducing the nation’s pension costs), employers are not always keen to give jobs to people over even 45 years of age.
Instead, employers may simply narrow the market of job applicants to people they do want – a scenario that the Queensland Department of Justice says is already a reality for the sunshine state.
“The current skills shortage reported in Queensland is not a blip in labour supply. It reflects growing competition for the available workforce,” the department says.
Rather than keeping an open mind about who they interview for jobs, “businesses that target recruitment to the prime age group (26 to 40 years) will limit their potential pool to just 20 percent of the working age population.”
The point is that there is no one solution for the challenges older workers – and the Australian government – face, but rather many different options. The popularity of older workers on Airtasker, however, is giving many senior workers more hope.
Not only does the site offer people a chance to take work when they want it – and keep the hours that they want as a result – but it also fosters a sense of entrepreneurialism that could lead to other business ventures.Supporting this development is recent research at Swinbourne University, which actually shows that “seniorpreneurs” are the fastest growing segment of the entrepreneurial market.
“Notwithstanding the surge in interest in the seniorpreneurship phenomenon, there are certain nuances that differentiate this age group of entrepreneurs from mainstream younger entrepreneurs,” Dr Alex Maritz, a leading researcher on the topic in Australia, explains.
“Overall, anecdotal evidence points that older people are in a better position to start a business than younger individuals. Furthermore, senior entrepreneurs place significant value on non-pecuniary benefits of self-employment, such as lifestyle and health preferences.”
As the online world becomes more integrated with everyday life, it also makes sense that seniors would turn to the web for business purposes.
Whether it is through odd-jobs sites like Airtasker and Gumtree, online training courses or even web-based businesses, the demographic that Airtasker has dubbed the “Grey Army” has a lot of new work opportunities to explore.
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