Potential has no age limit. Ben Williams at Sten10 considers the shift from ‘early career’ to ‘emerging talent’ programmes and the unique considerations for fair and objective assessment.
Many employers still picture emerging talent as someone right at the start of their working life: early twenties, no industry experience, learning fast.
In reality, apprenticeships and entry-pathway roles are increasingly filled by people returning to work, switching careers, or starting later in life.
Emerging talent refers to employees who are at an early stage in a specific career pathway and who are expected to learn and aspire to progress within their field.
Potential vs experience
There’s a well-known finding in psychology: give people two equally strong candidates -one with achievements, the other with potential - and we tend to rate the ‘potential’ candidate more favourably. It feels exciting. Open-ended. A story still unfolding.
The problem is that, in practice, we often equate potential with being early in life, not early in this career. Someone in their 40s entering tech for the first time may have enormous potential-but we don’t label it that way because it doesn’t fit the mental picture.
By way of an example, a few months ago my son got an electric skateboard. Naturally, the responsible parental thing to do was buy one for myself too -purely to ensure his safety, you understand.
He learned to ride faster. Better balance. Sharper cornering. That’s fluid intelligence doing its thing: quick learning and adaptability.
I, on the other hand, brought different assets:
- knowledge of the Highway Code
- awareness of local by-laws
- the patience to work up to the 30mph top speed
That’s crystallised intelligence: knowledge, judgement, the ability to map learning into the real world.
The point? We both ended up competent, but by different routes. His learning was quicker; mine was more cautious, contextual and wise. Neither of us is the “right” model of potential-just different.
Early careers programmes often assume the skateboarder who learns fast is the natural choice. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes the person who reads the by-laws prevents the lawsuit.
Hiring to a ‘prototype’
People rarely set out to exclude older candidates. We simply hold an internal picture of what ‘a graduate’ or ‘a trainee’ looks like - timing in life, not capability.
When someone doesn’t match the prototype (older, returning to work, switching sectors), the subtle reaction is: this doesn’t quite fit. This cognitive shortcut can lead to biased decisions being made – and missing out on diversity of thought and approach.
Rejecting people who are ‘too experienced’
When someone with significant experience applies for a role traditionally positioned as entry level, we assume they’ll be bored or leave quickly. There is some evidence they may leave sooner - if the role offers no progression and no space to use their skills.
But performance? That’s usually not the issue. When autonomy and meaningful work are present, people with ‘surplus’ experience perform just as strongly, sometimes better. The mismatch is often in job design, not the individual.
In other words: the job may be underqualified for the person, not the other way round.
Language matters
What we call something determines who applies.
If a programme is described as ‘early careers’, older candidates often assume they are not invited. If it’s described as ‘emerging talent’, the mental shutters don’t come down quite so fast.
That doesn’t solve everything, but it changes who sees themselves in the frame and who hiring managers see as legitimate applicants.
Words don’t just describe categories; they create them.
What employers can do
Here are six considerations for hiring potential at any age:
- Clarify who the programme is for.
If it’s open to career-changers or returners, say so explicitly. Don’t rely on candidates to decode the marketing.
- Assess skills and behaviours, not life stage.
Define the capabilities needed to succeed, then design assessment around those behaviours. If your scoring system looks for ‘recent university experience’ rather than the ability to ‘analyse unfamiliar information’, something is off.
- Design pathways that don’t force everyone back to zero.
If someone joins with experience, consider advanced entry points, accelerated progression routes, or differentiated training so they aren’t artificially reset to square one.
- Prepare managers before they meet candidates.
Bias shows up fastest in early screening decisions. Provide short guidance on what counts as relevant experience, how to recognise different forms of potential, and what not to infer from age as part of your assessor training.
- Refresh attraction language.
Avoid terms like ‘fast-paced, energetic, digital native’ and replace them with transparent capability signals. People self-exclude based on wording long before selection happens.
- Measure who gets through and who doesn’t.
Track outcomes by age band, life stage, entry route and prior experience. Data reveals patterns that ‘good intentions’ miss.
If we want to widen the talent pool, we may need to retire the idea that early careers must start earlier in life. Is it time to drop the term ‘early careers’ as a whole? The world has moved on and our language might need to as well.