Age before beauty

Image credit: Photo by Ari Seth Cohen for advancedstyle.blogspot.com

Can’t do this blog without mentioning the weather – we’re just loving it – and rather than slowing things down business wise the ‘feel good’ factor it generates seems to be making our clients super decisive and on top of their game.

Working with the Executive team from the best of London fashion colleges (we’re biased but reckon this to be true) earlier in the month we were lucky enough to enjoy a Mediterranean-style evening on a terrace reflecting on the options and opportunities open to future generations. This touched all of us, not just professionally but personally too as parents, aunts, brothers, sisters etc. Then it got really interesting as we left the X and Y generations and moved onto Generation U.

Generation U

Depending on which end of the spectrum you’re looking from the ‘U’ can either stand for ‘unemployed or underemployed Undergraduates’ or ‘un-retired’, take your pick. Even with cheerier figures being bandied around by the great and the good in Whitehall, I certainly wouldn’t want to be fresh out of uni and looking for work at the moment. Who knows what the future will bring, but with universities offering a record number of places this year (up 9% by all accounts) it could be more of the same.

Room for everyone

We’re increasingly coming into contact with these ‘un-retireds’ (not a very exciting descriptor really is it) and we’re not talking about sad undecided execs who don’t know what to do next! In our experience they aren’t just sticking around in the job market because they need the money, far from it. They know their stuff and, more importantly, their worth. In fact I’m just back from catching up with a CEO we used to work with – his intention was to retire to ‘work the land’, but he’s found himself working on a consultancy basis for two public sector advisory bodies, as a NED on a trust board and for good measure some mentoring work on a voluntary basis too. He’s relaxed about it all because he doesn’t really HAVE to do it and as a result he’s loving it. Something to be encouraged, this giving of time and experience, acting as  the bridge if you like from one end of this ‘U generation’ to the other. Perhaps it’s down to one of our own guiding values at Maier in the end – generosity of spirit.

Regardless of which ‘U’ best describes your current state of affairs have a look at the link below, could be an interesting one to go along to.

http://newsevents.arts.ac.uk/event/mirror-mirror-representations-and-reflections-on-age-and-ageing/