Author: Wayne Loke

I’ve been on both sides of this. At Stats NZ, at ANZ, I sat in rooms where hiring decisions were made, and I listened to managers explain, without much discomfort, why certain candidates had filtered themselves out before the conversation even started. Too old. Too expensive. Too set in their ways. I filed those observations away as a feature of how organisations work, the kind of thing you absorb without examining closely when you’re on the side where it doesn’t cost you anything. I never thought I’d be the person they were describing.

Then Te Pūkenga restructured, and I found out what the view looks like from the other direction.

What made that redundancy different wasn’t the experience of losing a role. I’ve navigated that before, and so has anyone who’s spent a career moving through organisations. What made it different was the scale of what arrived at the same time. New Zealand’s unemployment rate was rising. SMEs were closing. Retail strips were emptying. Office blocks across Auckland and Wellington sat vacant. The government had already signalled it was disestablishing Te Pūkenga entirely. Geopolitical pressures were moving through GDP numbers, and GDP numbers were moving through hiring decisions, producing fewer roles at every level, not just at the top. A single professional or individual contributor role could attract 200 to 300 applications or more. These weren’t forces I could network or position my way around. When conditions compress that hard, across that many variables at once, you stop asking what you did wrong and you start asking what is actually happening.

What is actually happening, it turns out, is not what the advice industry says.

At one of the career transition forums that came with the redundancy package, I raised ageism directly. The coach running the session disagreed. Ageism is a myth, he said, because experience is value and the market rewards it. His prescription was presentation: revise the CV to be value-focused, strip graduation dates and anything older than 15 years, reframe long tenure as transferable skills, apply for roles one or two ranks below where you were, consider fractional or part-time arrangements to make yourself more affordable, offer reduced hours to lower the risk for potential employers. I’ve since seen the same prescription in outplacement guides, HR publications, YouTube channels aimed at “professionals in transition,” and LinkedIn posts about managing redundancy over 50. The advice is consistent across all its sources. It travels well because it sounds reasonable, and because it gives people something to do while they wait for the outcome to change.

The outcome doesn’t change. The advice is solving the wrong problem.

The moment you walk into an interview room, the CV has done its job and stopped mattering. The panel sees you, not your document. Your age is in the room whether your graduation date is on the page or not, and the panel’s response to it has already formed before you’ve opened your mouth. If the panel is younger, which it usually is, their assumptions about what you represent have been running since you came through the door. Older applicants move more slowly. Older applicants are set in their ways. Older applicants have seen too much, and “I’ve been there, I’ve done that, this won’t work” reads as obstruction in an organisation that needs to believe it’s trying something for the first time.

The irony is plain once you see it. The pattern recognition that comes from 30 years of watching the same decisions play out, which is the thing you’re supposed to be selling as value, is exactly what reads as resistance to someone who hasn’t yet sat through the cycle. A younger hiring manager who hasn’t watched a rebranding exercise fail twice, or a restructure reduce headcount without changing anything structural, or a digital transformation stall in precisely the way the last one stalled, cannot easily distinguish between an older employee who is obstinate and one who is simply right. And here’s the part that makes this genuinely hard: they may never know the difference, because every generation of employees has to learn certain lessons by living them, regardless of what the previous generation already knows. The pattern recognition is real. The inability to transfer it is also real. So the panel defaults to the safer assumption. You get filtered out, and the exit is labelled overqualified.

Overqualified is a polite word. In most of the cases I’ve experienced or observed, it doesn’t mean your experience exceeds what the role requires. It means the panel has run a calculation that won’t survive being said aloud. You might leave once something better surfaces. You might be harder to manage if the manager is 15 years younger. You might not adapt quickly enough to how the team prefers to work. None of those concerns appear in the feedback, because none of them would survive a formal grievance process. Overqualified covers them cleanly, and the conversation ends there.

A better CV doesn’t reach any of this. Perception doesn’t change in a 45-minute interview, regardless of how well the transferable skills are packaged.

Some advice goes further. Career coaches recommend working personal networks, reaching out to contacts who might know of opportunities, letting people in your industry know you’re available. I understand the theory. But what I’ve found is that professional relationships don’t carry the weight that word “network” implies. The people you work alongside are colleagues while you share the same floor. Once you leave, most of that contact fades, and fades faster than most people want to admit. And where a genuine relationship does exist, a peer-level contact inside another organisation has limited reach. The hiring decision sits with someone more senior. A peer’s recommendation rarely travels far enough up the chain to change what the panel has already decided, especially when that panel is already running the calculation I’ve just described.

Applying a rank lower doesn’t escape it either. A junior role attracts more applicants, not fewer, both younger candidates and older ones in the same situation as yourself, and the same cost and perception logic runs again, except now you’re competing against people who represent lower salary expectations and carry none of the assumptions that follow seniority. The advice to lower your sights is framed as widening your options. In practice, it narrows the corridor and adds more people to it.

What surprises me is not that the advice fails. What surprises me is how long the mechanism has been running without anyone naming it cleanly.

At Stats NZ, I had hiring managers tell me, without lowering their voice, that certain candidates were too old and had effectively removed themselves from consideration. This wasn’t a crisis conversation. It was a routine observation, offered the way you’d note a missing qualification, and then the meeting moved on. At ANZ, I watched older employees, some past their own stated retirement age and still contributing meaningfully, get quietly sidelined before restructures arrived. The restructure wasn’t the cause. The sidelining came first, and the restructure was the instrument. In both cases, the organisation wasn’t responding to any particular economic event or technology disruption. It was running a function it runs continuously, as a matter of normal operations, well below the level of deliberate policy.

Ageism is the current word for that function. The word is useful in the sense that it gives people a shared language for an experience that is real and measurable. Research confirms what many people already knew from inside it: people over 50 face lower callback rates and higher rates of underemployment than their credentials alone would predict, and the gap is consistent across OECD countries. But the word also carries an implication I find misleading, that this is a problem generated by contemporary conditions, one that could be addressed through better hiring practices, stronger legal enforcement, or, as the coaches would have it, a more strategically constructed CV.

The function predates the word. Organisations were running it in the 1990s, in 2005, in 2015. What changes across those periods is the economic context that makes it more visible to more people at once, and the vocabulary available to describe it. The function itself is stable. It’s closer to an immune response than a crisis, the organisation’s natural mechanism for cycling through generations of people, managing cost and perception thresholds in ways that rarely get said plainly. Like most immune responses, it operates below the level of deliberate decision-making. Nobody sits in a room and decides to discriminate. They make a series of smaller judgements about fit, energy, risk, and cost, and the accumulated weight of those judgements produces a consistent result. The result has a name now. It had the same shape before it had the name.

The coach who told me ageism is a myth wasn’t lying. He was describing the system he believed he was operating in, one where experience carries value, the market is rational, and presentation determines outcome. That version of the system does exist in certain organisations, for certain roles, under certain conditions. I’ve seen it. But it is the exception, not the default. The default is what I watched at Stats NZ and ANZ before I had any personal stake in understanding it, and what became undeniable during the Te Pūkenga redundancy when every economic force in the country arrived at the same moment and left very little room for alternative explanations.

I’m not writing this to argue that older employees should stop applying, or that the coaching advice fails in every situation. I’m writing it because there’s a real cost to explaining a structural function as an individual presentation problem. When the mechanism operates at the level of the organisation and the advice operates at the level of the CV, the only explanation available when the advice doesn’t work is that the individual didn’t execute well enough. Try harder. Polish the story again. That conclusion suits the system perfectly.

I’ve been on both sides of the table. I know which side has more information.

ABN AMRO ran a three-day programme for every officer at manager rank and above. The subject was this: what makes a bank a bank.

I attended it in the early 2000s. The facilitator opened with a question, and answers came back the way they always do in a room full of experienced people who haven’t been asked this before. Deposits. Savings accounts. Housing loans. Payment transactions. The facilitator let the room finish, then said: No. The business of banking is brokering. You take money as intermediary, you lend long, you borrow short, and you extract the margin between. Every ratio the organisation tracks, every headcount cost you manage, every basis point on a loan portfolio, it traces back to that one mechanism. Understanding it changed how I read every decision I was part of after that, because I finally knew what the decision was in service of.

I remember thinking: I’ve been in financial services for years, and nobody has ever explained this to me.

This was not a welcome-to-the-company session. The room was full of ranking officers, some with years of service already behind them. ABN AMRO ran it because knowing your own function and understanding the business you’re working inside are two different things, and they had decided the second one required deliberate instruction, regardless of your tenure.

That is what succession planning looks like. The real version, where an organisation takes responsibility for making sure its people understand what they’re contributing to, how the organisation survives as a going concern, and why developing someone through the ranks is an obligation rather than an optional bet. I attended that programme once, at a Dutch bank in the early 2000s, and I have not seen anything approaching it in any organisation since.

Every organisation I worked in after ABN AMRO shared a condition so common it stopped being remarkable. Most people had no idea what made the organisation viable. They knew the process they ran, the team they sat in, the system they operated. They did not know how the organisation generated its revenue or delivered on its purpose, what the unit economics looked like, or why any of it depended on them staying and growing rather than leaving when a better offer arrived. Nobody had explained it to them, because nobody had been tasked with doing so.

At ANZ National the closest attempt existed. There were frameworks, names in boxes, readiness ratings reviewed on a quarterly cycle. The structure was on paper. The problem is that a real succession pipeline requires sustained capital and sustained effort, and when the cost and effort came into focus, it didn’t fly. What happened every time a senior role opened was the same: the market. External hire, premium cost, cycle repeats.

At Stats NZ, BNZ, and Inland Revenue, the situation was simpler: there was no attempt at all. When roles opened, the organisation looked outside, paid more than an internal candidate would have cost, and called it efficient resource management. I watched that pattern hold consistently across every organisation I worked in, and the common element in each case was that nobody had ever explained to their people what business they were actually in.

The argument against investing in people has a surface logic. You develop someone, they build capability, and then they leave. The benefit flows to whoever hires them next. So the conclusion most organisations land on is to hire capability rather than develop it: bring someone in who already knows the job, carry the salary premium, avoid the development risk.

Follow that logic downstream and the flaw becomes visible. Workers trained somewhere, at some point, by someone. That somewhere has to exist. If every organisation applies the same reasoning and nobody trains, the pool of experienced talent available to hire from starts thinning, salaries at the experienced end inflate because demand accumulates without supply to match it, and the organisations that chose never to invest in developing people find themselves competing to pay for people that some earlier employer, somewhere, did invest in.

There is a fear underneath this that I’ve heard stated plainly enough over the years: if I train my people, I’m training them for my competitors. That fear isn’t irrational in isolation. Acting on it at scale creates the exact problem it was trying to avoid, a labour market full of people with skills but no organisational depth, moving from role to role because no organisation has ever given them a structural reason to stay.

The mechanism that resolves this tension does exist. Service bonds tied to development investment: the organisation funds a significant programme, the employee commits to a minimum tenure in return. Blunt instrument, but it aligns the incentives honestly. Chartered accountancy uses a version of this through its apprenticeship model, supervised work with a qualified firm before you can qualify fully. That pipeline is still functioning well enough in New Zealand that the programme is oversubscribed, hundreds of applicants competing for limited positions. The model works. It’s just not replicated at any scale elsewhere.

The default everywhere else is that development happens incidentally, through work, without structure. The organisation assumes the education system has done the foundational work. Graduates arrive, enter a role, and build from there. What the education system cannot do is teach someone the specific business of the specific organisation they’ve joined. That knowledge is internal. It requires someone to take the time to explain it, the way that facilitator at ABN AMRO took three days to explain what makes a bank a bank. Without that, you get people who are technically employable and organisationally adrift, contributing to a process without understanding what the process is part of, with no anchor deep enough to keep them there long enough to be developed into something the organisation actually needs.

Youth unemployment in New Zealand sits at 15.9% as of March 2026, per Stats NZ. Three times the national rate. The explanation most prominent in media and political commentary is AI. The story is that AI is absorbing entry-level roles, particularly in office environments where decisions are process-driven and binary, and the jobs that used to give young people a first foothold are disappearing.

There’s something in it. Roles built on processing work where the majority of decisions follow a predictable path and exceptions are all that require human judgment, those roles are genuinely exposed. Some of those positions were entry-level, and they’re thinning. That’s real.

But AI is a convenient story. It’s external, it’s technical, and it removes the organisation from the chain of causation. The economy plays the same role. When a commenter in my LinkedIn post that prompted this piece wrote that she hadn’t seen evidence of AI replacing entry-level jobs in practice, she was pointing at something real. I asked her whether she’d ever been on a succession plan in her organisation, or whether her company simply hired someone to replace her when she left. Her answer: she had not been on any succession plan, nor seen one in any organisation she’d worked for.

She runs her own contracting company now, which changes the equation for her. She keeps her skills current because she has to. But she had years of employment inside organisations before that, and the pattern she described is the one I’ve heard consistently across several sectors: no pipeline, no structured development, no explanation of what the organisation was actually trying to do. Just a job, adjacent to other jobs, in a structure nobody took the time to explain.

AI and the economy are cover stories. They describe conditions that are real enough. They do not account for the pipeline that organisations chose, over decades, not to build.

The mechanism isn’t complicated. An organisation that never explains to its people what it’s actually in the business of doing will not retain those people through difficult periods, will not develop them into the roles it needs filled at the next level, and will not be able to backfill from inside when the time comes. It will go to the market, pay the premium, and describe what follows as a talent shortage.

There is a talent shortage. It was constructed, incrementally, by organisations that treated succession planning as a compliance exercise and development as a cost to be deferred. The young people at 15.9% unemployment are the visible end of a problem that runs through every level of the workforce. The entry-level jobs are where the pipeline starts. If they’re shrinking, some of that is economic conditions, some of it is genuine automation, and a significant portion of it is that organisations have no structural incentive to create them when they’ve never built a development pipeline to justify the investment in the first place.

You can’t extract from the talent market indefinitely without anyone replenishing it, then reach for an external explanation when the extraction catches up with you.

I sat in that room at ABN AMRO for three days and came out knowing what I was part of. Every organisation I joined after that, I was still asking the same question.

Nobody offered the three days.