At the age of 55, it’s sometimes tough to find a new job.
That was the tongue-in-cheek premise of “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert’s interview Monday night with President Obama. Colbert, playing an office manager, notes that “55 — that’s a tough time to start over for a man” and then gives Obama some advice for nailing an interview.
At one point, Colbert asks Obama why he’s leaving his current job, and Obama replies, “Honestly, there wasn’t a lot of room for advancement in my last job.” Colbert then jokes that “it sounds like you can’t stay.” When Obama counters that he’s “leaving because it’s required by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution,” Colbert jokes that “what employers hear is that you stole office supplies.”
All joking aside, many older workers do have a tough time landing a new job once they hit 50, research shows. “Occupational opportunities decline for workers changing jobs after age 50,” concludes a study released in August 2016 by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Some of the toughest fields for older workers include those that require a lot of manual labor, including such jobs as roofer, fisherman and firefighter.
However, some fields are more open to hiring older workers than others, the CRR research found. Here are 10:
- 1. Sales demonstrators
- 2. Crossing guards and bridge tenders
- 3. Farmers (owners and tenants)
- 4. Guards, watchmen and doormen
- 5. Taxi drivers and chauffeurs
- 6. Bus drivers
- 7. Dressmakers and seamstresses
- 8. Messengers
- 9. Protective services
- 10. Retail sales clerks
The downside: Jobs for which a larger share of older workers are hired tend to pay about 6% to 7% less than those for which lower shares of older workers are hired, the CCR study showed. Indeed, crossing guards, security guards and retail salespeople, for example, only make about $13 an hour and messengers about $14 per hour — and many in these lines of work make less than that.
