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In this episode of Work in Progress, I'm joined by writer-producer Ron Friedman and David Gittins, executive director of Age Inclusion in Media, to talk about the way the media portrays older adults and how these stereotypes can have a profound impact on workers and job seekers in the real world.







I'm going to start out by saying, you can read about this conversation, but I believe you need to hear it or watch it for yourself to really capture what it means to be portrayed as "out of your prime" just because of your age.







At 91, Ron is a great example of someone whose creative mind and spirit are just as sharp as they were when he started writing more than 60 years ago.







The name Ron Friedman may not be familiar to you, but there is no doubt you've heard of some of the television shows that he's written for in his career – All in the Family, Get Smart, The Odd Couple, Happy Days, and Starsky and Hutch to name a few.







In all, Ron has written more than 700 episodes of television and is well-known among action hero fans for creating the animated series G.I. Joe and developing Transformers for American TV. Along with his good friend Stan Lee, the pair created The Marvel Action Hour.







"I still get residuals. I still get fan mail. Somebody wrote to tell me that they loved my Odd Couple. I wrote that in the 70s, but they're still playing it. I must have known something valuable to contribute what I contributed to give something that life expectancy," Ron says.







Yet, despite all the early success, as he got older, he found that he was getting hired for fewer and fewer writing jobs. He says it come down to ageism, and, unfortunately, it is something most older adults face today when they are looking for work, whether it is in entertainment or another industry.







"Not only is it acceptable, but of all the protected classes – where you have to be on guard not to use the offensive terms or reproduce the memes that offensive – ageism is still not even considered," says Ron.







Ron, David, and I sit on the board of Age Inclusion in Media, a nonprofit campaign to change the way older adults are portrayed in film, TV, and advertising.







"It's still a very stereotypical way, and that's down to the fact that we don't have proper representation behind the screen. We don't have proper representation in the writer's room," David argues. "When we don't have older writers writing for older characters, we get stereotypical portrayals of what an older character is, which means we get tropes, we get cranky old characters, we get forgetful old characters, and we get sidekicks as opposed to central characters in their own lives."







David says that this lack of representation, and the stereotypes it creates, has an impact on every older adult.







"From what we show on screen teaches us how to believe and that then teaches us how to act. So, if we see older characters being portrayed as passive morons who are just leaching on society, then we start to treat older people like that in their life, which then circles back in and saying, we're not going to hire an older person because we know they're idiots. We know they're useless because we've seen not on TV and we believe it."







Ron says we've got to stop telling the "same old story." Older adults, like all of us, come in many different shapes and sizes - one stereotype doesn't fit al. Society needs to embrace that age is jus one part of who we are. We are an amalgamation of our life experiences - what we have learned at school, in our jobs, and just living our lives.







Like everyone, it is very personal. He believes that despite already being "two and a half times older than T...

In this episode of Work in Progress, I'm joined by Bijal Shah, Guild's new CEO, to discuss how big companies are helping their employees find their next career step inside or outside the company through education benefits. And, we look a new Guild partnership that's helping Olympians find their next career beyond sports.







Shah is new to the job of CEO, assuming it full-time in April after 34-year-old CEO and co-founder Rachel Romer stepped down to focus on her continued recovery from a stroke she suffered last summer.







The number of employer partners has grown over the years and now includes businesses like Chipotle, Discover, Hilton, and Target. With growth, Guild has had to deal with some of its own structural changes. In May, the company cut a quarter of its own workforce.







"As Guild’s business continues to grow, we must ensure that we deliver on our mission as efficiently and effectively as possible...we have decided to restructure our organization," Shah said in a statement. "While difficult, these changes will ensure that moving forward, we operate more efficiently, innovate faster, and continue to deliver strong outcomes for our stakeholders," she added.







Guild's role with the partner companies is around creating education benefits, including training programs that will arm the workers with in-demand skills. Shah says this has proven beneficial for employers and employees alike.







"We are solving a problem. These (employees) are craving learning opportunities. They want to get their associate's degrees or bachelor's degrees. They want to further educate themselves, and the alternative is taking on student debt. This is a way that they don't have to do that.







"Our data shows across our broad employer population, those who go through Guild are two times less likely to leave their employers than those who do not. There's an immediate retention benefit.







"We also see benefits in attracting talent. When people are thinking about employers of choice, one of the things that I think folks are thinking about is how is the employer going to invest in me as the employee in a way that outlives even working at that employer or the specific job I have right now," Shah adds.







One of the sets of skills employers are looking for is "durable" or "soft" skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and risk assessment. We go into the "how" of teaching those skills in the conversation.







We also take a look at the new partnership with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee that is providing education benefits to current and former Olympians.







"Many of the athletes don't actually get those huge multimillion-dollar sponsorships, they're living paycheck to paycheck. They spend all their time investing in their athletic careers, and then one day their athletic career ends and they need to find their second act," Shah says.







Find out the details of the education plan in the podcast.







And you can listen to the podcast here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on our Work in Progress YouTube channel.























Episode 320: Bijal Shah, CEO, GuildHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode hereWork in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here

In this episode of Work in Progress, I'm joined by Steven Lee, CEO of the SkillUp Coalition, a nonprofit that has already supported two million people looking for training and job pathways in in-demand careers. We discuss the first four years of the organization's work, and what is ahead this summer, including the launch of a new AI-powered tool.







The SkillUp online platform is free.







It offers both a curated selection of training programs that are low-cost, short-term, and offer industry-recognized credentials, and a job search tool that lists work in high-demand industries needing the skills you can learn through that training.







Lee explains that SkillUp purposely targets people without college degrees and earning under $40,000 a year to ensure they have equal access to careers offering livable wages plus benefits.







"Our mission is really to give them a leg up in their journey towards a skilled, high-quality job. We've tried to make it easy and simple for them to get the highest-quality information for them to make the right choice – whether that's the right career that someone should choose, whether that's the right training program from which they might get a credential to get that skill.







"We select programs that are a combination of low-cost because sometimes folks don't have the financial resources, short-term because sometimes folks don't have the time, and as best as we can, some proxy of quality. From the hundreds of thousands of programs out there, we've selected down to a few thousands that we think are best-in-class."







Lee says the organization's jobs tool only lists jobs that don't require a college degree. "The jobs have to pay living wage in their local community, based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator. They also have to be with companies that we've identified as being good at upskilling their workers," he explains.







Lee describes the SkillUp platform as a "choose your own journey" platform, with the user picking the types of training and jobs that they want to explore on their own.







In July, the nonprofit is rolling out a new tool – powered by AI – that it hopes will help the user discover even more career pathway options by "recommending" very specific programs to that individual. It's called CareerNavGPT and it was developed by SkillUp in partnership with Brighthive, AdeptID, and Burning Glass Institute.







Listen to the podcast to learn more about how the CareerNavGPT tool will work. Lee and I also talk about the push toward skills-first hiring and whether employers are truly acting on the idea.







You can listen to the podcast here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on our Work in Progress YouTube channel.























Episode 319: Steven Lee, CEO, SkillUp CoalitionHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode hereWork in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here

In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Gayle Goldin, deputy director for the Women’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor, joins me to talk about some of the longstanding barriers to good-paying jobs facing some women in the workforce today, and what is being done to fix the problems.







Women are a critical part of the U.S. labor force and contribute significantly to their families' economic security and the U.S. economy, filling half of all jobs in the country. But women continue to experience longstanding disparities in the labor force – overrepresentation in certain lower-paying jobs, underrepresentation in other higher-paying ones.







When the pandemic hit, women, particularly women of color, were overrepresented in the sectors of the economy suffering the largest job losses – retail, hospitality, and education. Also, many women found it too hard to continue to work with the pandemic’s additional impact of closed schools, lack of childcare, and fear of illness.







According to Goldin, "The women's labor force jobs often tie to care and service jobs and are undervalued. You're a hotel worker. You're a restaurant worker. You are in the care economies, providing child care or elder care. We also see that the jobs are at the lowest end of the pay scale, around minimum wage. They're not paid as much as higher-paid, predominantly male-dominated jobs. That's where we see that real disparity."







While the number of women in the workforce has returned to pre-pandemic levels, that doesn't mean the playing field is level, according to Goldin.







"We lost ground because of COVID. We still feel the reverberations of that a little bit. There certainly still is a gender wage gap," she tells me in the podcast. "One of the things that we look at when we talk about the gender wage gap is what kind of jobs women are in – economists call this 'occupational segregation.'"







She uses the example of skilled trade jobs. "Women only make up 4% of the skilled trades. Yet, particularly in those unionized jobs, those are pretty high-paying jobs, with good job quality. We want to make sure we're finding pathways for women to both improve the quality of the jobs that they have, and new paths for women to enter into careers that are traditionally higher paying."







What does this mean in dollars and cents?







Here are the numbers from the Women's Bureau for 2020, the latest year with full data comparing the media wages of women who work full-time, year-round to the wages of men who worked full-time, year-round: 









"All women were paid, on average, 83% of what men were paid. Or put another way, women were paid 83 cents to every dollar paid to men.  







Many women of color were paid even less. For example, Black women were paid 64%, and Hispanic women (of any race) were paid 57% of what white non-Hispanic men were paid." 

















Goldin and I discuss what the federal government is doing to encourage and support creation of those new paths to higher-paying careers and to address the need to provide supportive services to women for child care and elder care and for paid leave. She says these are important issues for women, their families, and the U.S. economy.







"The good news is women are back in the workforce, back up to the pre-pandemic levels. We have seen some growth in the amount of women with (young) children being able to enter the workforce, and that's great too. And we need to keep going with the policy change that we need to see, so that we get the strongest economic growth that we can get."







You can listen to the podcast here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts...

In this episode of Work in Progress, I am joined by Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor, employer engagement for AARP to talk about the aging workforce and why it is good business for employers to actively hire and promote older workers.







Refusing to hire a person or to promote them based on age is absolutely against the law.







Still, recent studies show that adults over the age of 40, including a vast majority of baby boomers, believe their age puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to finding a job, or limits their career opportunities.







Tinsley-Fix says the most recent AARP survey shows that 64% of workers over the age of 40 have felt or experienced age discrimination or ageism at work.







"It's largely subtle because it's unconscious. Most people have ideas about what 'old' means. Anyone who is older than they are is old. A 20-year-old thinks a 40-year-old is old and a 40-year-old thinks that a 60-year-old is old.







"But, in terms of feeling it at work, it can be slight comments like 'I'm having a senior moment.' It can be things like suddenly getting flat or even negative performance reviews when nothing in your performance has changed.







"It can be being passed over for innovative, or exciting, or challenging opportunities. It can be assuming that you're not interested in learning new skills. Companies might be really pushing upskilling to the younger parts of their workforce and not to the older parts of their workforce."







One of the perpetual and persisting stereotypes in society is that older adults are afraid of the changes in technology that continue to shape how we live, play, and work.







"It's one of the most entrenched myths about older people – they're 'not good with technology,' which is just ridiculous. Not only does AARP research show that 50-year-olds and up are just as active and avid consumers of technology as younger folks, we know that at work plenty of workers are able to adapt and move with the times and adopt to new platforms. It's frustrating that it's so entrenched and that it's still there, but it does persist and it's not true," says Tinsley-Fix.







She emphasizes that these misperceptions about older workers and jobs seekers – including their "fear" of new technology – impact their ability to find work or get a promotion.







And its not only the employees that are suffering. Employers have been saying for years that they are having a hard time finding talent for certain jobs. They are missing out on the skills and talent of this growing part of the workforce.







Right now, about one-in-five workers is over the age of 55 and that is expected to grow to one-in-four as baby boomers continue to decide to stay in or reenter the labor market because they have to do so financially, or they simply want to do so.







Tinsley-Fix goes on to outline the skills the older worker brings to the job and the advantage an employer that embraces a multigenerational workforce has over their competition.







You can listen to the podcast here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on our Work in Progress YouTube channel.























Episode 317: Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor on employer engagement, AARPHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode hereWork in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here

In this episode of Work in Progress, Courtney Brown, VP of strategic impact and planning for Lumina Foundation, and Stephanie Marken, senior partner at Gallup, share details of a new joint study that finds that college affordability is a top concern for Americans, despite seeing a degree as valuable to career success.







The Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education 2024 shows that cost remains a major barrier for students seeking a postsecondary education, with 38% of students plunging deep into date to pay for their education beyond high school.







"We have seen over the last decade enrollments declining in postsecondary education. At the same time, we need more talented people in our country. This is a problem. We see over and over again that cost is a huge barrier," Courtney Brown of Lumina Foundation tells me.







Stephanie Marken of Gallup adds, "We very intentionally interviewed people who don't have a degree or credential because we want to understand their attitudes towards and experiences with postsecondary education pathways, whatever that pathway might be. We found that over half of those who we interviewed who were not currently enrolled reported it was a very or somewhat important reason as to why they were not currently enrolled."







The researchers also talked to students who are currently enrolled about the high cost of higher education. "About a third of students who we interviewed reported that cost is a major barrier to continuing enrollment. We asked individuals if they considered stepping out in the past six months. We found about a third said that they had struggled to remain enrolled. Cost was the major reason for that," according to Marken







The study also finds that 71% of those who borrowed for postsecondary education struggle for years to repay their loans, says Marken, delaying major life decisions "whether that was buying a car, buying a home, having children, returning to postsecondary education for those who had stepped out temporarily. It's really keeping them from achieving important milestones that we would say is a life well-lived."







Despite the high cost, says Brown, the survey found that people do value a degree or a credential beyond high school. "We see over and over again that they say having some credential after high school is extremely or very valuable. That includes a certification, a certificate, or a degree.







"And 75% of students who were previously enrolled say that it's extremely valuable, so even the people that have not completed (their degree). I think it's really important that we understand that people value it, they just can't access it."







Brown also talks about the impact of not being able to afford college. "It's huge. We're seeing more and more schools having to close because the enrollments are declining. So that becomes a problem. That also becomes a problem for the communities those institutions are in because they're probably one of the number one employers in those communities.







"So there's this cascading of effect when enrollments start to decline. And most importantly, we're not going to have thriving communities. We're not going to have a nation that can compete economically, socially with others around the globe.







Brown and Marken address some of the other fallout from college being out of range financially for students of all ages. You can listen to the podcast here, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.







Read the Lumina Foundation-Gallup State of Higher Education 2024 report here.























Episode 316: Courtney Brown, VP of strategic impact and planning, Lumina Foundation,