When Kathy Fox’s former employer announced plans to replace its mainframe computer system with a Java-based network, she decided to take night classes at Des Moines Area Community College to update her skills and position herself for another job within the company.

Her company did offer her a different job, “but it wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I opted to be laid off,” said Fox, who had 27 years of experience as a COBOL programmer. It was 2001, and the job market was still flooded with programmers from layoffs following the Y2K transition. Fox gave herself six months to find a job and began full-time classes at DMACC.

“I did get a couple of interviews because my qualifications are very strong,” said Fox, who is now 60. “But when I interviewed … they didn’t tell me it was age. But since I was getting in the door and I was qualified to a T for some of these positions, I thought it had to be age. I’ve never had a problem finding a job before.”

Fox, who did not file an age discrimination complaint, has since launched a Web design business. She said she knows of other experienced IT professionals in their 50s and 60s who have either been laid off as employers outsourced jobs or who are overlooked by Central Iowa employers who don’t value their experience.

According to Iowa Workforce Development statistics, nearly a quarter-million Iowans who are 55 or older are working. Those 243,662 people represent 17 percent of the state’s work force, and the size of this age group has increased by more than 12 percent between 2004 and 2006.

Iowans filed 397 age discrimination complaints in fiscal year 2006 with the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, a 6 percent increase from the previous fiscal year. A total of 421 age discrimination cases were closed by the agency last year, abut 100 more than the year before.

Neither statistic necessarily proves more employers are discriminating by age, but the increase does indicate there is more awareness, said Ralph Rosenberg, the commission’s executive director.

The majority of age discrimination cases filed are settled or withdrawn before a hearing is convened, Rosenberg said, with a few ending up in court. Age is probably the fourth most frequent discrimination complaint, behind disability, race and gender, he said.

If any IT companies in Iowa are discriminating by age, that would be news to her, said LeAnn Jacobson, executive director of the Technology Association of Iowa.

“That’s something I’ve never, ever heard before,” Jacobson said. “The employers are very hungry for talent, and I don’t think they can afford to be discriminatory. They are happy to find workers wherever they may be.”

With the anticipated shortage of workers in Iowa, particularly in information technology professions, “we’re going to need to tap into different pools of talent,” said Jacobson. Her group plans to work with DMACC and other community colleges this year on programs to reach more potential workers, including older Iowans, she said.

AARP Iowa, in conjunction with the Iowa Department of Elder Affairs and the Central Iowa chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management, is in the early stages of developing a program to assist mature workers in marketing themselves more effectively to employers, said Ann Black, a spokeswoman for AARP Iowa.

The goal of the curriculum is to provide older job applicants with the tools to “assemble their experience into manageable form so that a human resources person can look at it and understand it,” she said. “We also want to do education, to make sure employers are aware of potential discrimination, and also to hear about the value that mature workers can bring to the market.”

Black said some employers may incorrectly assume that older workers will demand higher pay than the companies are willing to offer.

“That just because they had made a higher salary, that they wouldn’t consider lower salaries,” she said. “That perhaps some assumptions are being made by human resource professionals, and that’s one thing that an education program might address.”

Fox, who has been in business for four years now, said she has established a good client base and enjoys the freedom of working for herself, though she’s making less than she did as a programmer.

“I see this as a blessing in disguise,” she said. “I never otherwise would have gone back to school or started my own business. I see the same thing happening to other people in my industry.”