Why Do We Discard Experience?

 

Something painful is quietly happening in our workforce today, and many of us pretend not to see it. A man turns 50. He is not tired, broken or incapable. In fact, he may be at his sharpest, having survived recessions, corporate politics, leadership changes, market crashes and digital transitions. He has seen projects fail and rise again. He knows where money leaks, where risks hide, and where egos destroy value. But the moment he updates his CV, something changes. Suddenly, he is ‘expensive’, ‘overqualified’ or ‘not aligned with company direction’. And if we are brutally honest, sometimes he is simply ‘too old’.

 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

 

We see job advertisements demanding 10 years’ experience but offering salaries that barely justify the responsibility. We see four roles merged into one title. We see cost optimisation replacing value optimisation. The irony, of course, is that in some fields, experience is still worshipped. Some lawyers with 25 years in court become more valuable, not less. Their experience compounds, and their clients trust them more deeply with time.

 

Many senior doctors are not viewed as ‘costly’ – patients will willingly wait months to consult them because experience, in that field, is directly linked to confidence and life-or-death decisions.

 

Yet in many corporate environments, the same experience is reduced to payroll weight – until a crisis hits, a system fails or skills shortage emerges. And suddenly, we are looking around saying, “We need the oldies.”

An uncomfortable truth keeps surfacing: we are losing experienced teachers faster than we can replace them. Over 19,000 teachers in Malaysia opted for early retirement between 2022 and May 2025, according to the deputy education minister.

 

Experts and education advocates have proposed bringing retired teachers back as part of the solution. It is not hard to understand why. Classroom management is not theory. Discipline is not learned from a PowerPoint slide. Teaching is not just content delivery – it is character formation.

 

Think of a retired teacher in her late 50s who has taught three generations in the same town. She knows family backgrounds and understands behavioural patterns. She can manage a classroom with a look, and her students still greet her years later with genuine respect. That is not just teaching skill. That is accumulated social capital. And when the system struggles, we are reminded, too late, of what we gave away.

 

Policymakers, human resources leaders and government-linked companies need to rethink the design. That means incentives for hiring senior professionals, flexible structures for advisory and mentoring roles, and structured integration programmes. This is not charity but the strategic retention of human capital. If we can accept that retired teachers are needed to help stabilise education, then we must accept the larger truth too. Experience is not a liability but a national asset. The real question is whether we are wise enough to build systems that value it – before we are forced to rescue it.

 

Reference:

Why we discard experience – and then scramble to get it back, Amarjeet Singh, Aliran 26 Feb 2026