“In every old person, there is a young person who wonders what happened. » What if the business world, instead of seeing it as a simple joke, took this formula, incorrectly attributed to Groucho Marx, seriously? In other words, instead of seeing the old (let’s say “the senior”, to be less familiar) as a human resources problem to be solved, a potential victim of the generational war or a cost, we zoom out?
Zoom out to consider the subject from the angle of supporting the employee throughout their professional life, so as not to be caught off guard when the end of their career looms on the horizon. Anticipating aging would be of great service to everyone: to managers and employees, who are mainly concerned.
Demographic shock
It’s an accepted fact: the demographic shock we are experiencing impacts work. More and more old people, fewer and fewer young people, exactly like in the general population, except that the labor needs are glaring (1.3 million positions to be filled in the industrial sector alone by 2030, according to France Stratégie). The massive retirements of baby boomers will cause a drop in skills in many areas, while the ultra-rapid adoption of AI is weakening juniors in particular.
Faced with this equation of multiple unknowns, what can the company do? Today, she sees the iceberg arriving in panic. We are talking about a potential “generational war”, we are publishing charters of good conduct to properly treat our oldest staff, as if they were small, fragile things to be included in diversity and inclusion policies, instead of tackling structural issues. But in doing so, we forget that managing our workforce is first and foremost a very pragmatic art. It starts from the experiences of employees.
First of all, the observed differences in relationships with work, expectations with regard to the company or even professional mobility are largely due to other variables: working conditions, professional trajectories, organization of activity. Thus, a young worker often shares more experience with an experienced worker – constraints, room for maneuver, relationship with time – than with an executive of the same age. What we attribute to the generation depends, to a large extent, on the position occupied and the socio-professional category.
Question d’anticipation
Then, for equivalent socio-professional categories, the most marked differences relate to the concrete experience of work: quality of social ties, trust, cooperation or isolation. In other words, what distinguishes each person’s feelings is not only who they are, but the way they work. Work constitutes a fundamental social structure: it organizes relationships, distributes roles, produces interdependencies. It shapes expectations and ways of projecting oneself. It would therefore be wrong to read the generational situation in terms of… the date of birth!
This doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. This means that companies must treat the generational issue as a question of anticipation: what professions will be needed tomorrow? What skills will need to be developed? How can we support employees throughout their career, from entry into the company to the end of their career? How can we best use the young people who will enter the market? What will the needs be? Particularly in terms of reindustrialization or green jobs, which will not all be as glamorous as expected?
In reality, behind the intergenerational question, it is the entire employability of employees that we will have to rethink. Companies have long thought in terms of stocks: how many employees today? They will now have to think more in flow: what skills tomorrow, what transmissions, what renewals?
Last minute solution
Some propose radical solutions, far from being uninteresting: “Working hours will lengthen, making professional breaks, breathing space and training necessary,” argues Antoine Amiel in his book Professional training, the new class struggle (Aube, 2025). He concludes, regarding the “senior problem”: “We should prepare for our old age as soon as we enter the job market. »
It is obviously this type of thinking that we must move towards, otherwise we will miss the problem. This would allow, on the employee side, to feel useful throughout their career, through training, transmission, mentoring or preparation for retirement, and, on the company side, to continue to promote the skills accumulated over the course of their careers. In the absence of anticipation, some risk discovering late that they no longer know what to do with their most experienced employees, sometimes relegating skills sponsorship to the status of a last-minute solution.
In short, think long term and not short term. Easy to say in an uncertain competitive context? It’s true. But we never lose in anticipating. In every old man, there is an old young man. But in every young person, there is a future old person. Conclusion: to better take care of the elderly, we must take care of the young, anticipating the skills to be acquired, career transitions and work developments from the moment they enter the company.
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