I host Ankler Agenda, spoke to California AG Rob Bonta about the fight to stop the Paramount merger and wrote about brands funding scripted series, veterans’ layoff-survival tips, and the shows Apple TV to Netflix are buying.
This article is the first in a three-part Ankler series this week about age-proofing your career for paid subscribers. In youth-obsessed Hollywood, experience can make you a better colleague, sharper leader and more valuable operator — yet too often, the marketplace reads those same years as expensive, dated or resistant to change.
The answer isn’t to erase your experience or pretend to be younger. It’s to shake up the story your résumé tells and show that your career has been defined by reinvention: reframing what you’ve accomplished, updating how you describe it and proving you’re ready to help steer the industry’s future rather than relive its past. I hope you find it useful — drop me a line to let me know what you think at elaine@theankler.com.
Stephanie is a seasoned TV executive with three decades of experience who has shepherded popular shows you’ve definitely heard of. Like countless others in town, she’s on the job hunt.
She’s 54 and has not been employed full time for two years.
“It’s the longest that I’ve ever gone without a job,” says Stephanie (who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her career challenges), echoing what so many others have told me. “It’s hard because the jobs out there tend to be lower-level, and the people who I would be answering to are younger than me — much younger than me.”
Previous bosses have thought she was about 10 years younger than she is, and Stephanie is just fine with that. She doesn’t include her college education on her résumé so she doesn’t have to reveal the year she graduated. She refuses to let her hair go gray, dyeing it every two-and-a-half to three weeks. She’s been getting Botox every four months since her late 30s.
Nearly two-thirds of workers above 50 have either witnessed or experienced age discrimination firsthand, according to an AARP study. Boomers and older Gen Xers are entrenched in Hollywood leadership — and we’ve seen storytelling about triumphant seniors surge (Hacks, The Devil Wears Prada 2). But outside of those lofty ranks, age is largely seen as a liability: Of the more than 20 people who either wrote in or spoke to me for this story, pretty much everyone in their 40s and up worried about how their age would impact their ability to land a gig (and many younger workers were already thinking about such challenges ahead).
The competition is rough, and between the post-Peak TV slowdown and merger-driven layoffs, holding onto your job — or finding a new one — has never been tougher. But the good news for Hollywood’s corporate workforce is that there are very real ways that you can rebrand your expertise for a new era of entertainment, beef up your skill set and create a new professional narrative.
Today, executive coaches, résumé experts and industry veterans share a practical six-part playbook for:
- Understanding how Hollywood’s hiring market is likely to read your experience
- Deciding how far to bend on title, salary and job description
- Recasting a long career as a record of innovation
- Removing résumé and language “tells” that date you
- Building tangible proof that your skills belong in today’s marketplace
- Talking about your future without sounding trapped in your past
- Figuring out where you add value — and for writers, the case to stop scrambling for dwindling staff jobs
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