Working with 40+ generation
First things first, I will not talk about how important the subject is, I’ll describe my experience and the benefits it brings to my team.
Second: age diversity is just a program to “force” companies to hire people, and, here we have a big problem.
Forcing someone to hire a professional because of their age can lead to wrong thinking, like this diverse person doesn’t know anything about what and how we do things, but, you are wrong.
I have worked with people of different generations and learned how to explore and extract the better version of them.
In a previous experience, we have two people from an age diversity program, both of them 50+, one came from the HR field, and the other one from Telecom.
My challenge at that time was: how can I introduce them to the “product world”
And that’s my fellow, is how I met… My great colleagues.
Get Fernando’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
First, I interview them, and learn everything about their experience, what they have achieved, the gaps and things they need to learn.
From the HR person, I learned that he/she has zero problems talking to new people, explaining things in front of the public, and more.
So, using her experience, I tried to learn more about people management and drive him/her to work closely to power UX, interview users, make some notes, and, OMG, he/she was really good at that.
The other one, who has telecom experience, I learned that he/she works a lot with projects, defining the process, and so on.
For us, that’s an opportunity to improve and maintain consistency in our working process, since we don’t have Agile Coaches.
Of course, they needed some adaptation, learning new things, and making some mistakes, but this is the process of learning.
After 3 months, they are walking alone, making some decisions, and the better part: behaving like a senior (because they are seniors in a specific field).
Now, think about this: if they have experience in IT or as a PM, they will have more than 30 years of experience, imagine that on your team, they can have a point of view that no one in 10 or 15 years will have.
Maybe, they don’t know how git works or write some code, they don’t know how to do an opportunity tree, continuous discovery, etc… but they have experience, and they can contribute a lot.
We need to break some paradigms and be open to this reality where age is just a word.
