News from the 50+ Front

In Inc. Jessica Stillman cites a MIT and the Kellogg School study confirming that startup founders with the most success are over the age of 40.  She references another summary of the study by Jake J. Smith in Quartz, that goes deep on the research. The study was able to unearth 2.7 million business owners from public records and determine that older owners are more than twice as likely to be successful.

“The data revealed that a founder who is 50 years old is 1.8 times more likely to start a top company than a 30-year-old founder, and that a 20-year-old founder has the worst chance of all,” reports Smith

Link to the full article: How to Double Your Chances of Founding a Successful Startup: Get a Couple of Decades Older

Link to the full article: You’re twice as likely to found a successful startup when you’re 40 than when you’re 25

Reverse mentoring, intergenerational interaction or whatever you want to call it is finding momentum in communities and the workplace. Diverse generations are finding the value in an open exchange with people that don’t share the same experiences and are open to a dialog.

Chief Learning Officer published a story by Koreen Pogano reporting on a recent study from Wainhouse Research.

Things move fast in the workplace these days. The need to continue learning is a reality for workers of all ages. Workers seeking opportunities to learn new skills don’t fall into traditional buckets of generations anymore. Across the board, surveyed workers prefer a variety of platforms for learning. The youngest and oldest workers find conversational interactions especially useful.

Pogano writes:

• Coaching and mentoring appeals most to the oldest (50+ years old) and youngest learners (21-25 years old) out of all age groups in the workplace.
• Young workers find informal conversation with a subject matter expert to be extremely useful. As workers age, this becomes less of a top priority. However, by late career the trend reverses again, and the 50+ group shows greater interest in informal conversation with SMEs than those in mid-career.
• Overall, the study shows that mid-career workers aged 33-49 differ most sharply from other cohorts. For this group, short-clip video is the second-most preferred approach to learning.

Link to the full article: Survey Says: Your Employees Want Coaching and Mentoring

Stories you may want to check out:

1. Starbucks Discriminates Against Older Workers, According To Former Employees

2. 5 Ageist Stereotypes That Really Need To Go Away Already

Photo by: Ted Eytan