According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, It’s not just the kids who are Googling “unemployment.” Grandma and Grandpa too are looking for jobs online too.
Nearly 3.6 million people age 65 and older visited career-development Web sites in January, according to a Nielsen Online report. The majority of job site visitors — 18.7 million — are still between the ages of 35 and 49. But people 65 and older were the fastest growing group by far, up 41% from the same time a year prior. The figures represent a “desire to stay employed longer” in order to “sock away more retirement savings.
Workers age 65 and older made up roughly 17% of the work force at the end of the year, up from about 12% a decade earlier. The current jobless rate for that age group is 5.7%. The unemployment rate in January was 7.6%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest it’s been since the mid-1990s. As the Journal reported earlier this week, the elderly are a growing part of both the employed and unemployed. So it’s not surprising that they’re going online to job-hunt. A recent Pew study found that people age 64 to 72 account for 7% of the Internet-using population (almost equal to their 9% slice of the U.S. adult population). What’s more, roughly 45% of people between the ages of 70 and 75 were online in 2008, up from just a quarter in 2005 — the biggest growth in any age group found in the study. And 56% of people ages 65 to 69 were online last year.
Seniors also have greater access to the Internet than ever before. Two out of five people age 65 to 69 had broadband at home in 2008, four times greater than in 2005. One in three people age 70 to 75 had broadband at home in 2008, nearly three times greater than 2005. The study found that nine out of 10 seniors go online to use email. But the second most popular activity is search and research. Seven out of 10 people age 64 to 72 use the Internet to get health information.
