Is too much experience bad for your employment potential?

So you study and make yourself highly employable. But for what? And for what length of your life is your increasing expertise of any use to an employer?

When you are young and apply for a job you are often told you are under-qualified. When you get older you are told the opposite. So experience shows that you are only ripe for the job market between the ages of about 25 and 40. Just 15 years.

This creates the problem that, as you get older and gain more experience, you make yourself even more unemployable by being overqualified. So, at 72, based on this assumption, although I do not suffer from any debilitating health condition, I am personally useless; pure scrapheap material.

Overqualified? Does that mean I have too much information for my own good? Is there a medical diagnosis? 'No sir, you do not have oscillating plumbism rather you have vos votum ut reddo hic disease'. Too much knowledge for your own good and the good of an employer.

I have applied for a legion of posts relative to my experience. I even have an information website - rapier-pr.co.uk - to which I make reference on any job application. Few reply, but most of those that do often make reference to my experience in some way or another.

Comments like: "I do not think the post would be challenging enough." Surely that is for me to decide, or the advertisement was badly worded.

Or: "Gosh, I looked at your experience and it is extensive, but I feel that it is more than we require." How do they know without an interview?

Another: "With that sort of experience you should be applying for a higher executive position than we are offering." I replied to the advertisement as that is my choice; turning down an offer of expertise which could be of considerable use to the company.

From a financial side: "But you realise that the remuneration is not compatible with your experience." Do they think I cannot read an advertisement and make my own decision.

But the best is: "Sorry but you are overqualified." Just what bits of my experience would be of use? What bits should I have missed out on my application form? You mean to tell me that with all that knowledge I could not sort out what is most applicable to the task in hand.

Don't think that I apply for just any job. Semi-retired, I can tick along reasonably well financially. It is not about following in the financial footsteps of MPs, but more in challenging the grey matter. I have two very technically minded sons and five grandchildren and can hold my own with them. Also I am totally computer literate having purchased a Sirius computer and Qume printer when I established my own PR agency in 1983.

We have gone through at least six changes of computer updating since then.

Everyone talks about the difficulty of the young getting their first job and the cost of attending university. But what about those at the other end of life's scale?

Why do I make a plea for the older person? We are just as important as those starting out in their careers. We have other financial responsibilities, mortgages, helping the grandchildren, payment of taxes, but out of a much smaller income.

Not being political, but the government has shed crocodile tears over supposedly trying to help those of advancing years. It was Gordon Brown who raided our pension funds and caused the present pensions crisis.

Then the MPs with their 'gold-plated' pensions tell us that we will have to work to 70 and beyond. But we cannot because we followed their advice and became qualified. Now we are told that we are so overqualified that no one will even bother to consider our CVs. We are barred from the jobs market by either our advancing years or too much knowledge. What a waste of talent when all one can do is stack DIY shelves.

It would be interesting to work out just how much lost value there is to the country by not employing those with so much knowledge and experience.

One might consider how much better it would be for companies to employ more of the older generation as consultants:

1. We would not be interested in climbing the company ladder
2. Having settled on a cost for the task we would not demand a rise
3. No redundancy payments would be due if there was no more work
4. No holiday pay to cover and no expenses claimed.
5. We would not be interested in taking our superior's job
6. We could be too old for office romances so there would not be any broken hearts!

Having been headhunted for more than 50 per cent of my career moves I was told, many years ago, that I did not get a job, because I was older than the managing director. Another time I was told it was because I was more experienced than the person who would have been my head of department.

But the big mystery is how can one, as a consultant, be overqualified? Under-qualified I can understand. Surely when one takes on a consultant, or someone providing maternity or other cover, the company seeks a person who has a wide breadth of knowledge and expertise to bring to the task in hand.

Perhaps job applications should carry a list of qualifications/experience and anyone with more should be barred from applying.

So what have I done. Certainly not sat back and taken it. I had a business idea a year ago and have now set up an online business selling designer fence palings. I may be 72 but I'm certainly not ready to give up - I'll just use my 'overqualified' status to my own advantage.

Or, heavens above surely not - the thought just occurred to me. Could the problem be ageism. But what those now employing people now should consider is that they are on track for the inevitable – they will get old! What goes around comes around.

They should remember that there is only one way in which to escape getting old; that is to die young!
Problem solved????

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