By Theresa Rézeau 

There is a quiet irony at the heart of modern employment. We study, practise, make mistakes, learn from them and spend years refining our knowledge. Careers rest on the promise that judgement improves with experience, that mastery takes time and that wisdom cannot be rushed.

Yet somewhere along the way, time itself begins to work against us.

The years that once represented progress can gradually become a liability. Applications go unanswered. Interviews become harder to secure. Job advertisements celebrate candidates who are “dynamic”, “energetic” or possess “high potential”, language that can sometimes carry assumptions about age even when no age is mentioned at all.

The contradiction is difficult to miss. The candidate has not necessarily become less capable. Their qualifications remain. Their experience may have deepened. They may have navigated recessions, organisational upheaval, technological shifts, difficult clients, failed strategies and moments when decisions had to be made without the luxury of certainty. They possess something that cannot be acquired simply by accelerating a training programme: the memory of having lived through consequences.

Yet experience can become strangely invisible.

We speak constantly about innovation while sometimes detaching it from wisdom. We celebrate diversity while treating one characteristic that most human beings hope to acquire, age, as though it marks the gradual disappearance of potential.

Few artists challenge that assumption more beautifully than Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).

When the Japanese artist created Matsuri Yatai Dragon in 1844, he was in his eighties. Far from withdrawing from ambitious work, Hokusai was still undertaking major projects near the end of an artistic life that had already produced some of the most recognisable images in world art.

Look at the dragon. Against a fiery red ground, its body twists through the composition. Its form coils rather than settles. The creature appears charged with movement, its energy contained within a work made by the hand of an elderly artist who had spent decades studying how line could create force, rhythm and life.

There is a striking contradiction here: an old hand drawing vitality.

Hokusai himself did not appear to regard age as evidence that his potential was behind him. In the famous postscript to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, written in his seventies, he looked back at decades of work only to conclude that he was still learning. He imagined his understanding becoming deeper at eighty, ninety and one hundred, until eventually every point and line might seem alive.

The extraordinary thing is not simply that Hokusai continued working in old age, but that he continued imagining a future version of himself. Experience and potential existed in the same person, although modern employment often speaks as though they do not.

Potential tends to be associated with beginnings: the graduate, the emerging professional, the employee who can be developed, the person whose career appears to stretch indefinitely ahead. Experience belongs linguistically to the other end of the journey. One suggests possibility; the other can begin to sound like history.

But why should potential belong primarily to the young?

Every generation rightly admires youth for its energy, ambition and willingness to challenge inherited assumptions. Organisations need new ideas, and opportunities must exist for people entering the workforce. The problem begins when youth becomes confused with adaptability itself, as though curiosity, reinvention and intellectual growth arrive with an expiry date.

Hokusai’s dragon makes that assumption difficult to sustain. Its movement came from decades of accumulated practice, but accumulated practice had not made the artist static. Experience had given him more from which to move.

The distinction matters because contemporary working life is changing extraordinarily quickly. Artificial intelligence, automation and digital technologies are transforming professions while organisations repeatedly announce the need for adaptable workers.

There are legitimate reasons for employers to prioritise particular skills. Some positions require recently acquired technical knowledge. Others demand physical capabilities or experience with technologies that did not exist a decade ago. Businesses must respond to changing markets, organisational structures and economic pressures. None of those realities makes age itself a reliable measure of someone’s capacity to learn.

There is evidence that the disadvantage is real. In Inclusive Recruitment? Hiring Discrimination against Older Workers, published in 2017, economists Nick Drydakis, Peter MacDonald, Vasiliki Bozani and Vangelis Chiotis reported the results of a UK field experiment conducted between 2013 and 2015. When older and younger applicants undertook otherwise identical job searches, the older applicants received fewer interview invitations, including in cases where their experience made them stronger candidates. The researchers also found greater barriers for older applicants in some occupational categories and stronger age discrimination against women. 

What employers risk losing cannot be reduced to the number of years written on a CV. Experience has texture. An experienced professional facing a crisis may remember what happened when a similar decision was made years earlier, recognise warning signs because they have encountered them before, or understand how people behave when a restructuring begins. Much of that knowledge exists nowhere in the official record. It survives in people.

Artificial intelligence makes the distinction particularly interesting. AI can retrieve information, identify patterns and process enormous quantities of data at extraordinary speed. What it cannot supply is a person’s memory of having lived through the consequences of earlier decisions: the failed strategy, the relationship that took years to build, the warning that was ignored or the frightened team that had to be steadied when a plan went wrong.

That does not make technology the enemy of experience. New tools in the hands of people with accumulated judgement may create combinations of capability that neither possesses alone, just as a younger professional’s fluency with emerging technology can complement an experienced colleague’s knowledge of an institution, its clients and its history.

The same principle applies across generations. When younger and older professionals work together, knowledge can move in both directions. Remove one generation entirely and something is lost.

Mentorship makes this especially visible. Every accomplished professional was once inexperienced. Much of what eventually became judgement was acquired not through formal instruction but through observation: watching someone handle a difficult conversation, recover from an error, recognise a bad deal or remain calm when circumstances deteriorated. Skills can be taught explicitly; judgement is often transmitted indirectly.

Hokusai’s dragon offers another way of thinking about this accumulation. The lines we see in 1844 did not begin in 1844. Behind them stood decades of looking, drawing, revising and beginning again. The energy of the finished image was not produced despite the years behind the artist. Those years were part of what made the image possible.

Experience, then, is valuable not simply because time has passed, but because time can be converted into judgement.

Years alone guarantee nothing. An older employee is not automatically wiser than a younger one, just as longevity does not automatically make an artist a master. People can repeat the same habits for decades without learning from them. Experience acquires value when it remains responsive, when knowledge continues to encounter curiosity and when expertise does not become resistance to change.

Hokusai is compelling precisely because he appears to have understood this. His long career was not an argument for resting upon seniority. It was an argument for remaining unfinished.

That distinction changes the employment question. The case for experienced workers should not rest upon sentimentality, nor upon the idea that society owes every older person professional deference. It rests on the simpler proposition that ability should be judged as ability, adaptability as adaptability and potential as potential, rather than allowing age to stand in for qualities it cannot reliably measure.

When employers fail to make that distinction, the consequences are personal as well as organisational.

Work provides more than income. For many people it offers structure, identity, community and the satisfaction of contribution. Someone who has spent decades building knowledge can therefore experience repeated rejection as something more unsettling than an unsuccessful application. When age begins to appear as the unspoken variable, the question shifts from Will someone employ me? to Does everything I have learned still count?

That is where invisibility begins. The candidate still exists. The knowledge still exists. The capacity to contribute may still exist. What has changed is the willingness of someone on the other side of the application to imagine a future for that person.

And this brings us back to potential.

When Hokusai created Matsuri Yatai Dragon in 1844, he was not simply preserving the achievements of his younger self. He was still working, experimenting and pursuing the possibility of improvement. The old artist was still becoming.

Potential does not have to mean a blank page. Sometimes potential is what happens when a page already covered with decades of knowledge remains capable of receiving another line.

This does not diminish younger workers. Every generation needs entry, opportunity, mentorship and room to make its own contribution. The strongest organisations do not need to choose between youth and experience because the qualities each can bring are not natural enemies. Fresh knowledge can meet institutional memory. New technological fluency can meet seasoned judgement. Ambition can meet perspective.

Look once more at Hokusai’s dragon. It coils across the red ground with an energy that refuses the visual language of decline. The hand that made it had been drawing for decades, yet Hokusai still imagined that greater mastery might lie ahead.

Every young graduate entering the workforce today hopes, in one form or another, to acquire what the older candidate already possesses: years in which to learn, fail, adapt, recover and become better.

Age is not the opposite of potential. Hokusai was in his eighties and still imagining what he might become.

The invisible candidate was never truly invisible.
We simply forgot how to see.