Age-Friendly Jobs Are More Common But Older Workers Are Struggling To Get Them [Video]

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There’s good news and weird news when it comes to age-friendly jobs in America. The good news, according to a recent research paper, “The Rise of Age-Friendly Jobs,” by three noted economists, is that between 1990 and 2020, roughly three-quarters of U.S. occupations increased their age-friendliness.

Specifically, employment in what these economists call “above-average age-friendly occupations” rose by 49 million over that 30-year period.

A Head-Scratching Finding

“I thought there’d be an increase in the number of age-friendly jobs, but I was staggered at how big the increase was,” says Andrew Scott, a London Business School economics professor who wrote the paper with MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Nicolaj Søndergaard Mühlbach of the McKinsey consulting firm.

Now for the weird part: You’d expect that older workers — age 50 and older — would be the big beneficiaries of the rise in age-friendly jobs, but they aren’t. Despite a 33.1 million rise in people employed …