The number of easyJet cabin crew aged over 50 has more than doubled since 2022, up 127 per cent, according to the airline’s own figures. EasyJet says crew aged over 60 have “almost quadrupled” over the same period, and the airline has opened a fresh recruitment drive for the 2027 flying season, with applications opening in September. Getting there took a deliberate campaign. A large share of potential applicants assumed cabin crew work was reserved for younger people, and easyJet’s Director of Cabin Services, Michael Brown, put the fix plainly: over-50s bring both the skills to do the job and “a wealth of life experience that is appreciated by our customers and colleagues alike.”

This Is a Bigger Problem Than One Airline

The Centre for Ageing Better’s State of Ageing 2025 report shows why that perception carries a cost well beyond one airline. The UK’s employment rate for 55 to 64 year olds sits at 65 per cent, against 75 per cent in the Netherlands and Switzerland and 81 per cent in Iceland. The wider 50 to 64 employment rate sits 14 percentage points below the 25 to 49 rate. Closing that gap by 2030 would add an estimated £9 billion a year to the UK economy and £1.6 billion in annual tax and National Insurance revenue, according to the same research. That is the scale of value sitting behind a single, correctable assumption about who is fit to do a job.

The Same Bias, Earlier and More Expensive

The same assumption shows up earlier, and more expensively, in technology. CWJobs, working with the Centre for Ageing Better, surveyed 2,000 UK workers plus 250 people in tech who had experienced age discrimination, and found that tech employees start experiencing age bias at 29 and are considered “too old” by 38, roughly a decade before most people reach senior delivery roles. Forty-one per cent of tech workers report observing ageism at work, against 27 per cent across other sectors. Forty-seven per cent say they weren’t offered a role because of their age, and 31 per cent say they were passed over for promotion for the same reason. “Digital skills shortages mean discriminatory attitudes against age makes no business sense,” CWJobs director Dominic Harvey said when the findings were published, a point that has only got truer as the skills shortage he was describing has continued.

The Bias Has Already Reached a Tribunal

In Selazar Limited v McCabe, a tech company’s 29-year-old founder was found to have instructed a recruitment consultant to find “a younger team member who was more in tune with a young tech start company” in place of the firm’s 55-year-old finance director. The tribunal awarded her £125,604.98, including £20,000 for injury to feelings, and heard evidence that the founder had also signalled to potential investors that she was “too old to understand” the business. The case puts a figure on the same instinct easyJet had to overcome in reverse: treating experience as a cultural mismatch with a “young”, “digital” or “agile” identity, rather than as a straightforward capability question.

What Transformation Programmes Are Actually Short Of

That instinct is expensive in a way that goes beyond tribunal awards. Transformation programmes run into trouble for reasons that have nothing to do with technical skill: unclear governance, resistance treated as a communications problem rather than early diagnostic information, decisions made by people who have never been accountable for the outcome. Institutional knowledge, stakeholder trust built over years, and the judgement to recognise when a plan won’t survive contact with how the organisation actually operates are not junior capabilities. Screening for “young and agile” screens that experience out at precisely the point a programme needs it most, and does so before anyone has assessed whether the person applying could actually do the job.

The Fix Was Never Complicated

EasyJet’s fix did not require lowering a bar. It named the specific bias, redesigned recruitment and onboarding around it, then published the retention data alongside the recruitment numbers rather than stopping at the headline. Technology employers already have research going back years, and a tribunal ruling now sitting on the public record, telling them the same bias exists inside their own hiring and promotion decisions.

The Question Worth Asking Before the Next Senior Hire

What’s missing isn’t evidence. It’s a leadership team willing to treat this as a workforce design problem rather than a hiring afterthought. Before the next transformation lead, architect, or programme director role goes out with language built around “energy” or “digital native” instincts, it is worth asking what specific capability that language is actually screening for, and whether the organisation can afford to keep losing the experience it screens out along with it.