Hi Regina. I will be 40 this year too, and I work with people who are younger than me as well, at all different levels of "importance." Sometimes it can be difficult to follow directions from someone who is half your age, but I try to remind myself that age and skill don't really have much to do with each other. You can spend 20 years at a job learning new things and improving your skills every day, or you can spend twenty years doing pretty much the same thing you were doing the first year. I see this at my job, there are people who have been there for many years and they are still in entry level positions; then there are people who seem to get promoted as soon as they start. (I'm in between--I've been there a long time, but I have had successive promotions.) I also like to remind myself of how I felt when I was young and people assumed that I didn't know anything, and it angered me that people thought they knew more than me just because they were older than me.
It is OK to vent, I understand it must be upsetting to be working the same way for many years, only to be told you are doing it wrong. Although any time you start working for a new company--or a new management or new structure in your old company--you are going to have to expect that there will be a change in the way things are expected to get done, and will have to adapt.
I also kind of expect that when I get my first job in the UK, I will have a lower level of responsibility than I do now. I'll just have to grin and bear it.
