The OP asked about IT and in my experience: there are few fields that have evolved so fast as IT in the past two decades. Swiss companies dont really invest a lot in IT training. Many - not all, but many - Swiss IT folks dont put enough effort in keeping their skills fresh themselves... so hiring a young person a simple way of getting the new knowledge on the cheap. A seasoned expert that can proof he got the modern knowledge combined with experience and skills... will find a job in Switzerland without a problem. Yes, some older folks find some very comfortable niche in some legacy systems... but for the majority of people is that not the case.
I fully agree. But at the same time is in my experience the biggest blocker for any change in Swiss companies the "but we have always done it this way" brigade... because not everyone gets smarter with experience.
Actually the stats tell a different story, and surprisingly there seems to be no difference in motivation levels between old and young, you get the "slackers" and the "doers" in all age groups, also the skillsets tend to be level, you get highly skilled younger workers and highly skilled older workers with a sliding scale up from unskilled. Not surprisingly younger employees tend to take more days off sick, whereas older employees dont, but when they do they tend to be "out" longer and harder.
I am getting this from a report in the company where I am now and this is one of the few companies which doesn ́t look at age when hiring. I was hired at 60 and I am not the oldest in the project.
Fair enough, I must have an experience bias. One of my early jobs was reviewing efficiencies in a call center, on the metrics we could review, younger employees met and superseded their targets, whilst those more than 10+ years there were doing about 60% of the volume.
The common themes were how to motivate "experienced" employees, and how to hide the fact from the new people that they were doing the larger chunk of the role.
Personally I think it has a lot to do with the attitude of ones superiors. I am lucky enough to have a cabal of chiefs who dont get involved with the day to day "stuff" we do and who are happy to let us asscrack showing tech weenies chug along until the cows come home.