Why is it so difficult for the elderly to find employment?

Old people often run into obstacles in their job search process. Someone said that he graduated from Tsinghua University and is 58 years old. Before retiring, he worked as a project manager in a foreign-funded company. Now he wants to find a job again, but it is difficult to find a position with a salary of more than 5,000 yuan. Some elderly people said that the current career options are very limited, with only basic positions such as security and cleaning available. There are few companies recruiting elderly people and even fewer suitable positions. So, what is the crux of the difficulty in finding employment for the elderly?

Hu Zhan, deputy director of the Institute of Aging at Fudan University, said that because in the long history of human society, the proportion of the elderly has been stable at 3%-5% for a long time, today we have more and more elderly people. Aging is a phenomenon in modern society, so we are not prepared enough for it. Many systems in human society, especially the employment system, are designed with middle-aged and young people as the center. We have never considered that we will have such a large number of elderly people entering the employment sequence. So in fact, we are not prepared enough. There is no development, no innovation, and no serious thinking about positions, industries, and occupations suitable for the elderly. On the other hand, the concept of treating age also needs to be updated, so this may require the entire society to have a unified value or an upgrade of concepts.

The academic requirements for different recruitment positions on the China Senior Talent Online are different, but overall the academic requirements are not high, and 25% of the positions have no academic requirements. In contrast, a college degree is the most popular, accounting for 37.5% of the positions required; the highest educational requirement is a bachelor's degree, accounting for 18.8%. Positions include internal medicine directors, department doctors, industry consultants, nursing home directors, equipment managers, etc. It is worth mentioning that among all 80 recruitment positions, there are no recruitment positions for master's or doctoral degree holders.

In addition, nearly half of the recruitment positions do not require work experience, but 20% of the positions require more than 10 years of work experience.

Distribution cities: nearly half are in Beijing

Nandu Big Data Research Institute found that all 80 recruitment positions on the China Senior Talent Network came from 35 employers in 13 cities, including 15 employers in Beijing provide 39 recruitment positions, accounting for nearly half of all positions. Guangzhou ranked second, with 4 units providing 15 recruitment positions; in addition, recruitment units in Shenyang and Ningbo provided 7 and 5 positions respectively, ranking third and fourth. There are only one or two recruitment positions in other cities such as Xianning, Wuxi, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hangzhou.

The "2022 Retirement and Reemployment Survey Report on the Elderly Group" released by 51job shows that 68% of the elderly have strong willingness to re-employ after retirement, and 19% hope to continue to pursue career development. The "14th Five-Year Plan for National Aging Development and Elderly Care Service System Plan" also mentioned that it is necessary to strengthen employment services for the elderly and promote their social participation.