The Arithmetic of Experience

In the Netherlands, leadership advisor Viridiana El Hage, MBA—who works across Europe coaching executives on culture and organisational performance—recently wrote something that resonated far beyond Rotterdam. “We talk about inclusion, diversity, equal opportunity,” she observed in a widely shared LinkedIn post, “but age is often the first filter. Not performance. Not potential. Age.” Her post described professionals over 50 sending applications into the void while companies simultaneously insisted that the right talent simply did not exist. She called it what it is: an inconsistency that companies are actively helping to maintain by accepting that “younger is easier, cheaper, or a better fit.”

In Jamaica, that inconsistency is not just visible—it is documented and measurable. A letter published in the Jamaica Gleaner in October 2025 cited a conversation with a leading HR consultant who confirmed that some employers explicitly request not to receive candidates over age 40, with some setting limits as low as 35. Jamaica’s pensionable age is 65. That means a professional turned away at 40 faces a potential 25-year gap between rejection and any meaningful retirement support—a quarter century of working life, discarded.

The financial stakes are severe. Only 11.6% of Jamaica’s employed population participates in private pension schemes, according to the Financial Services Commission’s 2025 data. The National Insurance Scheme—Jamaica’s compulsory social safety net—offers support that, by most accounts, falls well below the cost of basic living. With life expectancy now at 76 for women and 73 for men, retirees forced out in their fifties could face 20 or more years of inadequate support. This is not a retirement planning problem. It is a labour market design failure with catastrophic long-term social consequences.

A Region Bleeding Talent Upward

The talent crisis Jamaica’s business leaders describe did not arrive suddenly. It has been building for decades, accelerated by a structural flaw that the island has never adequately confronted: the systematic export of its best-trained people. According to the International Organization for Migration, close to a million Jamaicans have emigrated to the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada over the past several decades. Over 80% of Jamaicans with tertiary education who live outside Jamaica were trained on the island—at Jamaican taxpayers’ expense. A 2024 report from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs placed Jamaica’s diaspora-to-resident ratio at 44%: nearly as many Jamaicans live abroad as at home.

The loss is not evenly distributed. It clusters precisely where it hurts most: healthcare, education, and executive leadership. Jamaica lost 60% of its nursing cohort to overseas recruitment drives in 2023 alone. The Jamaica National Teachers’ Association has flagged a growing shortage of trained educators, particularly in rural parishes. And in executive and leadership segments, the Caribbean Salary Survey Report PayPulse 2024—which benchmarked compensation across 20 Caribbean countries and 119 companies—found Jamaica among the lowest-paying markets in the region, with only 8.3% of roles paying above market value. This compares to The Bahamas, where more than 97% of roles, including CEO and CFO positions, pay above market.

What this creates is a compound problem. Younger talent emigrates for better wages. Experienced talent is filtered out domestically by age bias. What remains is a hollowed middle—organisations that are neither energised by fresh perspectives nor anchored by deep institutional knowledge. The Caribbean labour market paradox, noted in a February 2026 Jamaica Gleaner analysis, is precisely this: labour shortages in critical sectors coexist with persistent underemployment and skills mismatch, while productivity across the Caribbean fell an average of 0.6% per year between 2015 and 2025, far behind the global average productivity growth of 1.7% annually over the same period.

The Hidden Cost of Ageism in the Boardroom

When experienced professionals are pushed out of the workforce prematurely, the costs do not always appear on a balance sheet—not immediately. But El Hage’s analysis, drawn from years of working with European corporations navigating exactly these dynamics, describes what happens in the daily work of organisations that shed experience too quickly. Decisions take longer because people are still learning on the job. The same mistakes recur in slightly different forms. Managers grow fast in title but struggle under pressure. Senior leaders spend more time fixing than moving things forward. “That has a cost,” she writes. “You see it in slower execution, higher turnover, more pressure on teams, and missed opportunities that do not always show up immediately in the numbers—but are very real over time.”

Globally, the numbers are stark. AARP research in 2025 found that subtle age discrimination had been experienced by 60% of workers aged 50 and over in consecutive annual surveys. These included assumptions that older employees are less tech-savvy (cited by 33%), resistant to change (24%), or being given preference to younger colleagues for training opportunities (20%). Critically, 22% of older workers in 2025 felt they were being actively pushed out of their jobs because of age—a figure unchanged from 2024, suggesting these are not anomalies but entrenched practices.

For Jamaica, the stakes are amplified by the island’s demographic realities. Research published by the Gleaner in October 2025 on what it termed “involuntary early retirement” documented a silent crisis: workers losing jobs and income well before Jamaica’s pensionable age of 65, with inadequate pension provisions and declining family support structures—driven by falling birth rates—to absorb the shock. With women’s life expectancy now at 76 and men’s at 73, a worker forced into idleness at 52 faces more than two decades of financial and professional limbo.

The Global Reckoning Business Leaders Cannot Ignore

The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook for April 2025 devoted a full chapter to what it called the rise of the silver economy, documenting the global demographic shift and its labour market implications. The report noted that over the next 25 years, demographic forces will create headwinds for almost all economies. The boost to growth from keeping older workers engaged and productive could offset close to three-quarters of those demographic drags—but only if barriers to their participation, including skills obsolescence and, crucially, age discrimination, are actively dismantled. The IMF specifically identified that even as the functional capacity of older individuals improves with healthier aging, “other factors—such as skills obsolescence, pension incentives, and age discrimination—can still constrain their attachment to the labour market.”

The Inter-American Development Bank’s research arm has been equally clear about Latin America and the Caribbean specifically. By 2060, three out of ten people in the LAC region will be over 60. The IDB has noted that the region will reach aging levels similar to Europe or Japan—but with barely half the per-capita income those regions had when they faced the same demographic transition. This raises what the IDB called an urgent need for strategic responses that promote the inclusion, productivity, and well-being of older adults.

The silver economy itself—defined as the economic activity linked to populations aged 50 and above—is not a niche consideration. In Europe alone, it was estimated at 5.7 trillion euros in 2025. Research published in the Journal of Management Research in late 2025 noted that despite this scale, “business awareness and strategic mobilisation remain limited; many firms underserve older consumers and underutilise older workers.” This execution gap between demographic reality and firm behaviour is precisely what El Hage has been documenting across European organisations—and what Jamaica’s business community is replicating, often without realising it.

What Jamaican Companies Must Do Differently

There is no shortage of international models for how companies can begin to close this gap. BMW in Germany, Barclays in the United Kingdom, and Marriott globally have each piloted programmes specifically designed to attract, retain, and re-engage experienced professionals. The patterns are consistent: flexible work arrangements, including part-time, remote, and job-sharing; alumni engagement programmes that bring former employees back as contractors or short-term project specialists; reverse mentoring structures that pair experienced professionals with younger digital natives in mutual skill exchange; and explicit audit and removal of age filters from hiring processes.

For Jamaica specifically, the opportunity is more urgent—and more actionable—than the conversation currently acknowledges. The island already has a diaspora of professionals in their 50s and 60s who were trained here, built careers abroad, and may be willing to return or to contribute remotely under the right conditions. Diaspora re-engagement programmes that target this age cohort—with competitive tax treatment, clear pathways to contribution, and professional recognition—could bring back the very senior talent that emigrated during the brain drain decades.

The Real Question

The framing that Viridiana El Hage ended her post with deserves to be placed at the centre of every strategic workforce conversation happening in Jamaican boardrooms right now. “The real question is not why people over 50 struggle to find a job,” she wrote. “The real question is how long companies can afford to ignore a group they still need to perform, grow, and avoid costly mistakes.”

For Jamaica, the stakes of that question are even higher than in the European markets El Hage was addressing. This is an island that exports its talent at one of the highest rates anywhere on earth. It is a country where the formal social safety net for older workers is thin, where private pension coverage barely reaches one in eight employed people, and where employers have—by their own admission through HR advisors—been systematically filtering out experienced candidates for years. These practices are not correcting the talent shortage. They are a significant part of what created it.

The professionals over 50 who are applying into silence are not a liability. They are a balance sheet item that Jamaican business has been misclassifying for years—filing them under cost when they belong under strategic asset. The companies that recognise this first, that build deliberate structures to engage multigenerational talent, that bring back diaspora experience, and that price senior knowledge correctly, will not just solve a hiring problem. They will build organisations capable of navigating the complexity that the next decade in the Caribbean will demand.

The silver economy is not a social policy question. It is a competitive advantage waiting to be claimed. The only question is which Jamaican companies will have the strategic clarity—and the courage—to claim it first.