Why we discard experience – and then scramble to get it back

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’.

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 seniors.”

Consider our education system today. There is growing concern about standards, discipline, foundational skills and teaching quality. Parents whisper. Some shout. Policymakers debate reforms while exam formats change. Syllabuses are revised and technology is introduced.

Yet one 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.

Shaping young minds requires maturity, patience and authority built over decades. A system that once allowed experienced teachers to retire quietly is now realising that their knowledge cannot be replicated overnight.

This is not an attack on young teachers. Many are passionate and capable. But passion without mentorship can struggle, and energy without guidance can misfire.

A classroom is not a laboratory – it is a foundation-building environment.

When standards decline, when discipline weakens, when foundational literacy or numeracy falters, we do not reach for ‘cheaper teachers’. We reach for experienced ones. That alone should make us pause.

If experience suddenly becomes precious in education when a system is under stress, why do we treat it as disposable in corporate settings until something breaks?

It is the same pattern. We sideline seniors during cost-cutting phases, remove them to ‘refresh culture’ and replace them with cheaper talent. And then, when something cracks in governance, discipline, quality control or strategic direction, we scramble to hire consultants, advisers and retired professionals to stabilise what should have been preserved.

Experience is not merely knowledge but institutional memory. It is the ability to detect early warning signs and to remain calm in chaos.

Yet, we keep designing employment structures that undervalue it. An ageing society cannot afford to keep doing this – not economically, not socially, not psychologically.

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.

The deeper question

The bigger issue is not whether we should bring retired teachers back. It is why we never built a system where experience and youth continuously overlap in the first place.

Why is there no structured mentorship ladder where senior teachers train younger ones over several years before full responsibility is handed over?

Why are we not building similar models in the corporate world – pairing 25-year-olds with 55-year-olds instead of replacing one with the other?

This is not about resisting change but about intelligent transition. A strong system does not choose between youth and experience. It blends them, allows energy and wisdom to coexist, and builds succession with overlap rather than abrupt replacement.

When you remove experience entirely, you create fragility. And fragile systems eventually crack.

Time to rethink

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 have to 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.

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