The Myth of the Omega Job

Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife
by Susan Crandell

(Page 4 of 11)

When I was in my early forties, I used to talk about the Omega Job. I thought of the working world as an oversize game of musical chairs: When the music stopped, you'd better be sure you had somewhere to sit. As far as I was concerned, the music stopped at fifty. At that point, I needed to be in a position I wouldn't age out of, a job I could keep until I was ready to retire, because by then I'd be too old to find a new one.

When I did turn fifty, I was perched on what seemed like the perfect seat. In a notoriously ageist industry, I had landed at one of the few magazines in America that wasn't youth-obsessed. As the standard-bearer for More, I was the perfect age. Unless I screwed up, I could probably keep that job right through my fifties.

When I resigned two years later, I had already begun revising my theory of the Omega Job. The world had changed, and I no longer felt that UNEMPLOYABLE was tattooed across my back. As the leading edge of the boomer generation turned sixty, I could see the rules beginning to bend. Age discrimination hasn't gone away - ask anybody over fifty who's hunted for a new job - but a new way of thinking is starting to emerge. In some industries, we boomers are actually moving into a buyer's market. In 2008, the oldest boomers will be eligible for early Social Security benefits (that is, if Congress doesn't redo the math and raise the age at which you qualify), and a growing number of companies are worried enough about this potential brain drain that they're offering surprising incentives to attract and keep experienced employees. For example, Fortune reports that Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is wooing its senior scientists with up to six months a year off, or flexible workdays. And Home Depot touts "snowbird special" jobs, working winters in Florida and summers in Maine.

Home Depot was one of the original thirteen "featured employers" on a growing list AARP has posted on its Web site since February 2005 - companies that are friendly to older workers. Others included MetLife, Pitney Bowes, Borders, Principal Financial, and Walgreens. More than seventy-one thousand people checked out the listings in the first month of the program. Increasingly, companies are recognizing that we have job skills and work ethics that can make us the top pick for many positions. We're healthy and able - and unlike our parents, we don't dream of disappearing to an Arizona retirement village.

The New American Success Story:
Balancing the Life-Work Equation

When I was forty-six, I interviewed for a job at Ladies' Home Journal. Over goat cheese salads at a Manhattan restaurant, I told the editor in chief, Myrna Blyth, that there was one problem with hiring me: I wasn't hungry for her job. If she brought me on staff as her number two, she wouldn't be ensuring an orderly succession. In fact, I told her, I was a born executive editor who thrived on running the staff and putting together a vital, engaging magazine. I had no interest in hammering out budgets, playing politics within the parent company to secure resources for the magazine, working such long hours that my family spent more time with Katie Couric than me, or handling all the other administrative and lobbying functions that take an editor in chief far from the work he or she joined magazine publishing to do. Fair enough, she said, and offered me the job.

Six years later, we'd launched More, and now Myrna was retiring. She called me into her office and said, "Congratulations, you're editor in chief." Neither of us mentioned the no-promotion ultimatum I'd delivered so long ago. I knew that if I didn't take the big job, I'd get a new boss, and then I'd be out. The arriving editor in chief would want a handpicked number two to carry out her vision for the magazine. That's the way it works.

Swap iPods. Trade with a friend for a week, and listen to his or her playlist, not yours. Expand your horizons beyond the Beatles and the Stones.

And I can't say I'm sorry I said yes. I had the chance to run a national magazine at a critical stage in its life. It was gratifying to be the chief visionary of a publication that inspired enormous devotion among its readers. But the best thing about nabbing the number one job was that it inspired me to quit. If I'd never been pushed out of the cozy nest as Myrna's second in command into a job about which I had ambivalent feelings, I'd probably still be there. I'd have missed the chance to remake my work life, returning to reporting and writing, which I love, and quitting a punishing commute that I can no longer believe I once made every day.

Over the years, I seldom confided my lack of ambition, even to my friends. My generation of women had fought so hard to be considered for the top positions that not to want one seemed like a character flaw. I thought I was an anomaly, an oddball. Shouldn't I be grateful to be offered the big-cheese job? Once again, I belatedly discovered that my ambivalent feelings reflected a generational trend among both women and men. A Burson-Marsteller survey reported in Business Week in March 2005 found that an increasing number of executives don't want the CEO job - the "thanks but no thanks" crowd grew from 27 percent in 2001 to 60 percent in 2004. Other workplace observers confirm a "the promotion's not worth it" wave. Since the make-your-life-count wake-up call of 9/11, people eager to strike the right work-home balance are willing to sacrifice money and status. They'd rather be the sales associate who doesn't miss any of the kids' soccer games than the office manager who can't leave work.

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job.