lifer

A person in a corporate setting (e.g. aerospace engineering) whose sole ambition is to retire, and to garantee their survival until retirement. The lifer has minimal skills or exposure in their particular discipline, due in part to a 15+ year stay at their current (and often only) job. Additionally, those 15+ years are actually 1 year of experience repeated 15+ times. The lifer believes that getting ahead is about “staying power” and “paying their dues”, rather than tangible achievements based on applied experience in their field. When skilled individuals arrive, the lifer has no skills to fall back on to remain competitive, and instead relies on generation of politics to diminish the impact of the skilled individual.