Where the Jobs Are for Older Workers

But populous jurisdictions don't have a monopoly on older workers. Vermont, one of the least populous states, contains two counties that rank in the top 100 (Windham and Washington counties) and eight among the top 329 in terms of workforce participation for older adults.

"Despite whatever misnomers might exist, there is a great demand out there for mature workers,” says Mary Branagan, director of program and partner affairs at Associates for Training and Development, a workforce training and development outfit headquartered in Vermont.

Branagan helps oversee the state's Senior Community Service Employment program, which matches qualifying unemployed state residents at least 55 years of age with paid internships that help them update their skills and remain in the workplace longer. She says her company's offices in Washington and Windham counties are among its largest statewide.

In other areas of the country, Colorado has six of the top 50 counties both in terms of percentage of older adults who were in the labor market in 2017 and growth of that share between 2009 and 2017.

And older workers do well in rural counties heavy in agricultural employment, especially in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. Though the jobs are often labor-intensive, agricultural professions maintain some of the highest median ages in the country, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

That's due in part to much of U.S. agriculture being concentrated in family farms, the Department of Agriculture says. People can continue living and working on the farm well into their “retirement” years by scaling things down and renting land to other farmers.

At the other end of the spectrum, workforce participation among adults age 65 and older in 2017 was less than 12 percent in nearly 14 percent of counties with at least 6,000 residents. Kentucky, Michigan, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and West Virginia collectively accounted for more than 50 percent of those counties.

The percentage of older adults who were working shrank in more than 24 percent of counties between 2009 and 2017. Nearly 33 percent of such counties are located in Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky or North Carolina.

Experts say these lower-ranking counties are missing out on the potential benefits of having more older workers. These areas also stand to benefit most from investments in targeted skills training and other initiatives that would spur these adults off the sidelines.

"It's good for GDP growth overall and it's generally just good for the health of the overall economy,” says Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at employment hub Glassdoor, referring to older adults’ participation in the workforce.

Chen notes manufacturing-heavy areas within the rust belt and in states including Alabama and Georgia are among those with the lowest shares of older adults who are working. Manufacturing payrolls have plummeted over recent decades amid challenges of automation and globalization. Labor-intensive jobs that are prominent in those areas often preclude folks from working later into life, and the types of white-collar jobs prevalent in larger cities are in shorter supply.

"It's partly just how grim the job prospects are in a lot of micropolitan, or small city and rural, areas,” says Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “A lot of them are one-industry towns. And if that industry has been hit hard, that's going to be a problem for younger workers and older workers."

Burtless notes labor force participation among those 65-plus tends to be higher in urban areas where older workers are better educated, better compensated and less reliant on labor-intensive blue-collar industries.

"The thinking as to why highly educated people tend to work longer is that they may enjoy better health. They may enjoy better working conditions,” says Jen Schramm, a strategic policy adviser for the AARP Public Policy Institute. “They are likely to be paid more, so that's more of an incentive to keep working."