Ageless at Work - Skills for Care

articulate the experience, knowledge, skills and attributes of their older workers for business benefit;
the recognition that major organisational change can prompt experienced employees to take early
retirement rather than ‘sweat it out’ in an uncertain environment; the need to manage the relationships
between employees of different age groups (for example, establishing whether young managers are
equipped with the skills to manage an older member of their team); the opportunity to use age as a
hook to engage people in broader thinking about equality issues; and the need for employers to help
employees establish their desired work-life balance. The project evaluation found that action learning
sets were a powerful way of supporting peer exploration and learning but were difficult to ‘sell’ to
private sector companies even when offered free of charge they were unwilling to commit to the six
days required (Stevens and Denbigh, 2007).
The third project, delivered by ACAS, brought age legislation training to a private-sector company and
was designed specifically to help participants recognise age discrimination in the workplace, outline
good practice measures in tacking age discrimination, describe the business benefits of diversity in
the workplace and to identify barriers to employing a diverse workforce. The training proved very
popular with the company’s management and, while the project was not formally evaluated by the
SWOOP team because it extended beyond the life of the European project, tentative pre-training
assessments revealed that participants had a low level of technical knowledge about age legislation
and that the full extent to which the Age Discrimination regulations affect employment were not
understood (Stevens and Denbigh, 2007). All three projects demonstrated a need to raise
awareness of the implications of not only the Age Legislation but also of age positive employment
practice more generally.
The Equality Challenge Unit (undated) offers the following guidance on age positive action with
respect to staff training and development:
Training and development should be linked to the competencies, skills and technical knowledge
required by the job. In this way, decisions on access to training and development will be driven by
the demands of the post and the employee’s future career aspirations and will not be driven by
other, possibly discriminatory, factors and will be fair and transparent.
It is important that employers do not make assumptions that staff approaching retirement will not
require training. With the introduction of the ‘right to continue working’ staff may wish to maintain
and indeed develop skills so that they have the capacity to remain in post or progress within the
organisation.
Research shows that older people in particular may be reluctant to take up training and
development opportunities. This may be, in part, due to a lack of confidence or concern about the
training methods employed. Through the performance management process there can be a
discussion about the concerns of the individual and the most appropriate training method or style,
for example, e-learning, mentoring or coaching so that the approach is tailored to the needs of the
employee.
Tools are also available to support employers in dealing with broader age management issues
(including staff development within the workplace). These include Fair Play Partnership’s “Age
Driver” self-assessment tool (http://www.fairplaypartnership.org.uk/agedriver.php) and their age
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Ageless at Work: Change workplace cultures, development skills. Good practice report