Anyone have ideas, thoughts, success stories, etc related to getting a job in CH later in life? Particularly in IT (bottom 5 ISO/OSI layer)? even as a contractor?
i’m not at all ‘handicapped’ in any way. i feel like i’ve been homogenized, pasteurized, classified and ‘put into that box’… i’m not anywhere close to walking towards the sunset years …
TIA!
I work engineering consulting. Willing or not, I’m racing against the clock. I should save, network and gain experience to be able to become a freelancer consultant by 50 YO. If I stay as salaried, life will be miserable.
I won’t change the world. So, better to adapt.
Freelance is the way to go
Lots of companies need more people but are blocked by headcounts where freelancers do not count.
I moved to freelance when I was 64 and did seven more years.
the challenge i have is to get my foot through the door. Generally, HR in my recent experience, mechanically follow the job requirements and punt me out the door because they have a ‘younger team’ or ‘they found someone who fit the requirements better’… recruiting agencies work for the client company …
Having a bit of a time reaching ‘managers’/‘decision makers’ … I also try to point out that even as a freelancer, i’m done with ‘career building’ and will hang around, unlike younger folks looking to build a career …
Just speaking out loud here … i’m all for freelancing, myself … cant seem to find the right contacts/methods … i’m a bit handicapped now with my contacts … most retired early or moved away 
cheers …
At least you have a rare specialized knowledge. It’s not in your favor that it’s rare, it’ll take longer to line a new job, but the advantage is that it won’t be replaced that quickly with agents.
Doing simple cloud or web apps was my old-age plan B, but from what I see these jobs will vanish in the next few years, totally automated, so I’m playing with orchestrating minions to be the old guy who knows how to “program” in a new way.
HR really doesn’t understand what their internal client needs, they just go through applications and tick off when each requirement is covered.
So if the requirement says “likes horses” then write “of course, I have eaten horse meat all my life”
Not really but you understand my point. It is tedious to go through the requirements yourself to ensure each one is covered.
HR uses apps to do this so if you can find such an app it makes life easier.
with this ‘AI’ craze, it’s kinda hard to see where things will fall … Nowadays with ‘cloud’, IaC, provisioning, ‘capacity-on-demand’, etc … i also see these ‘sysadmin’ roles overtaken by ‘automation’ … similar in connectivity area …
sometimes i wonder if humans could even have a ‘supervisory’ role in all this, since machines will review, re-rationalize and automate at incredible speed and efficiency …
There is no obligation to put your age or date-of-birth or recent photo on your applications. And it should be irrelevant to HR in any case.
true, but even without those details on the CV, one can reasonably well surmise from dates of education, diplomas and employment history …
Not putting those details in a ‘swiss’ CV automatically raises flags, if not worse reaction like ‘he did not xyz… i already have too much work’ … btw, i do not put my photo on my CV …
nowadays, with applications through on-line portals, DOB is a mandatory field …
I heard that, I am surprised that is allowed here under Swiss privacy laws.
What i also noticed interesting are:
Swiss legal conformation, compliance and certification for the SaaS service and applicant/employee data … well, that’s a whole different compartment in pandora’s box …
So, make a typo, take a decade or two off your age. As said they likely can surmise the error from other data, but it is less likely to get chucked by the machine before a human sees it.
… good call … did not think of it …