America is no place to age gracefully. Of course, basketball players, dancers, and fashion models are finished young; mathematicians and chess players peak early too. So do construction workers and coal miners. Once you're 55, it's almost impossible to find a job in business. But a new trend is emerging: In corporate America, 40 is starting to look and feel old.

Since the early 1980s big companies have been getting rid of people. For a long time, though, seniority mattered. Hierarchy was respected too. If people had to be fired, the younger, junior people were usually the first to go. That's no longer true. The working world has changed. It has become faster and more efficient and, for many people, crueler. The unemployment rate hovers at 30-year lows; even so, companies announced the elimination of some 600,000 U.S. jobs last year, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm that tracks such depressing data. There's no way to tell how many of those people are over 40, but this much is sure: Companies today have less and less tolerance for people they believe are earning more than their output warrants. Such intolerance, or pragmatism, hits older workers hardest. The older an employee, the more likely it is he can be replaced by someone younger who earns half as much. "For my salary the company could hire two twentysomethings," says a 41-year-old we spoke to. "I'm good at what I do. But am I better than two people? Even I know that's not true." Today, for many people, the longer you've been at one company, the more disposable you are.
Here's a sign of the times: At Westech Career Expos, the nation's biggest technology-related job fairs, the registration form asks attendees to indicate their "professional minority status." One option is "Over 40." ("Until I filled out that form, I never knew I was a minority," remarked a 43-year-old white male attendee at a Westech expo.)

Perhaps technology is to blame. Maybe in this "new" economy, the old ways of doing business are indeed anachronistic--if the economy is new, who needs experience? Whatever the reason, in America today the skills that come with age and experience appear to count for less and less. It's hard to demonstrate with numbers, but a lot of people over 40 sense it: Youth, with its native optimism, is what companies want now. "The bar is lowering on what is considered old," says David Opton, executive director of E

Source: Nina Munk  at Forbes