As a research led organisation, we like to share our insight with our partners and clients. One of the recent questions we posed and tested was:
Does age and experience improve your resilience?
To answer this question, we invited 1,091 professionals to complete the BeTalent Resilience Questionnaire.
We conducted a one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to understand if there are any significant differences according to age and organisational level. We found:
- Younger populations are:
- More worried and pessimistic about the future.
- More likely to experience negative emotions or feelings of depression.
- More impatient and want things to happen quickly.
- More likely to feel vulnerable in high pressure situations. This may be due to having a limited range of experiences to draw from in order to cope with stress and pressure.
- Older populations are:
- More confident; they feel more at ease in challenging situations.
- More considered; they think things through before committing.
- More composed; they remain patient, tolerant and understanding.
- More optimistic and believe good things will happen.
- Regarding level:
- Executives were found to be the most carefree, and do not worry about the future.
- Lower-level individuals were found to be more hesitant, impulsive, impatient and pessimistic.
Our results have found that the older and more established we are in our careers, the more likely we are to experience the positive emotions associated with resilience and are less likely to experience the negative emotions.
We know that organisations perform better when their employees are mentally healthy, can cope with adversity and talk openly about their wellbeing, thus avoiding burnout. Therefore, taking the time to explore levels of resilience can be of value, particularly for our younger or more junior colleagues.
Research Note – The population was assessed by the following level and age:
Level:
- Individual contributor
- Manager
- Leader
- Executive
Age:
- 16-18 years
- 19-25 years
- 26-35 years
- 36-45 years
- 46-55 years
- 56-65 years
- 66+ years
This post was written by BeTalent, they are an exhibitor on the HRTech247 Talent & Performance Management floor of the Technology Hall. You can visit their virtual space here
