Age 50 plus - potential employees - Employers seeing 'millenial' employess as inexperienced.

Employers often fail to appreciate the experience

that older workers have to contribute to the workplace

Many employers are quite stupidly ignoring the decades of life and work skills that older employees can bring to a company.

Whilst we may hear of employees going on well past their retirement age because they like working and the job, they are sadly in the minority.

In the last century to date, people have been looking younger for longer. 60 is no longer seen as old, people who were 60 in 1939 looked 80 plus now. People who are 60 now were in the vanguard of the young once.

Evolution has taken steps and the next one is automation

There is supposedly 'ageism' legislation, but many employers are skirting this issue by looking at identifying pointers to eliminate applications from older people to interview.

They pursue the 'least cost option' of employing the youngest and least qualified, to whom they can pay the least.

They are sadly, missing out on employing people with real skills and experience who could enrich their workplaces.

Part of the 'education' system of recent years has been to 'breed in' a situation of dependency, creating a 'risk averse' and 'hands-off' generation. A generation that has been nannied to and hectored, not encouraged to take reasonable precaution and learn by practical experience.

The health and safety culture has deliberately engineered this dependency to the degree that in some large public establishments and corporations, a simple changing of a light bulb now generates the requirement for a 'professional' to attend a failed lightbulb, put out cones, erect a platform and replace said bulb, whilst charging around £100.00 to do so.

Common sense and a step ladder would have been cheaper and just as safe.

 

The risk averse culture - beyond health and safety, whatever happened to common sense

The Risk Business - life is a risk, manage it safely

We manage risk everyday in our own lives, whether that is crossing the road, making a cup of tea, using a power tool, risk is involved.

A self-appointed industry has sprung up and as such created a monster of hectoring, in many cases unregulated 'experts' who diploma in hand, 'advise' us, sometimes badly. Very.

Risk has become an industry, rather as race relations was in the 1970s.

Risk management is important but common sense should prevail.

Any Tom, Dick or Harriet can become a health and safety consultant. And that is the problem, they often miss out real risk, where it is obvious to the lay person that a risk exists. I have experience of this, having identified a list of possible risk situations which a consultant had missed or not appreciated.

Issues such as paint fumes, lack of eye wash information in case it got into the eyes, no suggested use of safety footwear, the list went on and was not rocket science. Just plain and obvious common sense. A most uncommon commodity it would seem.

This may have stemmed from the business model of the company being of the FCNK type - that is fur coat, no knickers.

Even basic and obvious requirements such as backing up of computer data was not done on a 'cost basis', even though the business would have been finished if that data had become corrupt or destroyed and the 'cost' solution was perhaps a couple of hundred pounds. This was an area where risk should have been managed but was chosen to be ignored. So it went from that basic disregard and extended into a production environment. Dangerous. 

Managing risk is good, but has to be balanced with common sense

We are breeding a new generation called 'Generation Snowflake' this has come about as a part of the 'health and safety' (often gone mad) industry. A few years ago, I worked in a workshop and we had a couple of school age students who came for work experience. This was to be an education.

The first student came with a two page list of hectoring do's and don'ts from a teacher. Use of power tools was banned, the use of hand tools had to be supervised and the best bit.... yes, the kid was not allowed to boil a kettle! No I am not joking.

So what did we do? We adopted common sense. We ripped up the list in our own minds and empowered the student with the use of common sense and moderate supervision.

And nobody got killed, or injured and actually did learn something. Essentially the student could see how we managed risk, adopted responsible working practices and worked safely.

Looking at risk should be kept proportionate to the situation

The real fallout of this situation is that we are now creating a generation of people who stand on the sidelines, who are dependent on other peoples for decision making and to do things FOR them.

How many people have recently drowned in a few feet of water because someone stands and waits for somebody to do the necessary? Too many.

It is essentially a control culture of dependency. We now have people who cannot change a fuse in a plug, cannot use basic hand tools, so it goes on. But there is on the other side of the coin, plenty of youtube evidence of 'fails' where people foul up on camera.

We read about it in the papers of someone being injured doing something really stupid.

We have lost the ability it seems for many to know what common sense is. The fact that people make dicks of themselves with ladders etc. is because they have been 'cotton woolled' and have little risk management ability it would seem. Rather like a child that runs into the road without apparently thinking.  

Its about time we got real.

Be a health and safety consultant, no apparent experience necessary?

Sensible personal protection at work is always a good thing,
I endorse a sensible and common sense approach

How many times have you seen someone working in civil engineering in the street cutting a paving slab with no air mask, no ear or eye protection, as clouds of fine silica dust billow around them and the public? Too many!

We often hear ridiculous 'nanny state' stories about over the top health and safety, but what do you need to be qualified to advise? Nothing it would seem, take this example I observed in a previous job.

I worked for a small paint company, it bought in a base product and tinted it to colour, no different from a number of companies.

Well, one day they had a contact from a health and safety consultant. The consultant came and she observed the operation and gave recommendations.

I was very disturbed to see that it was obviously apparent that this person seemed to completely miss the very obvious glaring to me, issues.

Now, in my past I have worked spraying paints, in vehicle restoration and working with media blasting to clean off metals, I take sensible safety precautions with personal safety because I am aware of the dangers. I take proportional risk because I observe proportional and sufficient safety - I call it the common sense approach, it works.

So let us discuss the case I outlined. The mixing area for the paints was separated from the admin office where around 10 people worked, by a four foot corridor and two doors, both of which were almost permanently open.

As a result, paint and solvent fumes could be smelt in the admin office. Wrong.

The paint mixing room being a manufacturing area did not have any signs prohibiting members of the public from entry. Wrong.

In the mixing room, a ventilator extraction fan was in the wrong place and was not used. There was no viable fume extraction means in that small room. Wrong.

The company (I pointed out to both the Directors) did not obtain from the paint base suppliers, any medical information on how to treat ingress of their various products into the eye or onto the skin etc. There were no eyewash stations in the room nor any first aid procedure specific to treating the accident relating to the paints or rehearsed procedure to deal with any accident. The Consultant missed this. Wrong.

None of the 3 paint room staff wore safety shoes, one was an apprentice of 17, who was frequently handling 5 litre tins of heavy base product. At my suggestion, he did get supplied with a pair of safety trainers.

It was a start, but the Consultant did not pick up on this. This came from me and my concerns. The mixing staff did not wear barrier cream and rarely vinyl type gloves.

There was no fire drill, there were extinguishers, but I don't think anyone in the office had been trained to use them. There was apparently no chemical symbols on display for the fire service to see in case of a fire, nor were the fire service to my knowledge aware of chemicals on site in bulk quantities including solvents. Again, the Consultant did not identify this. Wrong.

So you can see the potential here for a dangerous situation. As a result of complaints from the admin office where I worked in Sales, one Friday afternoon, I was unable to concentrate and had to go out of the office due to the prevalent solvent fumes.

And others in the office did complain as well. This solvent was discontinued with but the problem should never have arisen in the first place, had proper practice and observation by the Consultant been made and implemented. Wrong.

Now I am not saying go over the top, but the company could have saved the fee of this useless Consultant by asking the staff. I actually identified the above concerns without having been a safety consultant, just because I had common sense and practical experience.

I would suggest that the advice report the Consultant gave to the company was not worth wiping your arse with, but costly into the bargain. I often wonder what would have been the outcome had an accident happened and been investigated.  

The 'I told you so' comment from me would be little consolation. But then again, why would a company listen to someone like me with real practical experience, when they can buy it in from someone with a letter head and a business card who claims to be proficient?

So there you have it, become a consultant with no risk, it would seem.