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Working and ageing
138 Guidance and counselling for mature learners

redundancy, as a result of organisational change, or changes in technology
and markets which makes their skills obsolete. In both cases, the case for
training rests on a future need, which may be underestimated.
The policy challenge is to make sure that older workers and their employers
are aware of the risks, and prepare for them. It suggests that more attention
should be given to career review, and guidance more generally after the mid-
40s, before the effect of age discrimination becomes severe, regularly
reviewing how to develop transferable, and demonstrable, skills which will
increase security, with the current firm, with another firm or in an extended
retirement. There is a potential role for training here to broaden peopleʼs
horizons and encourage them to develop, and learn to transfer, their skills
before redundancy strikes. However, there is relatively little training of this sort
available, and neither government nor employers have shown any inclination
to support it (indeed government, by focusing funding on young people is
implicitly endorsing the discriminatory attitudes it deplores in some employers).
The training picture is also problematic for outsiders. Once out of work after
50, the chances of returning at a comparable level or of returning at all, are very
low, and decline rapidly with age. No doubt, some people become unemployed,
and unemployable in later life because their skills are out of date, but for some
the problem is more inability to prove skills acquired through experience and
on the job. However, the idea that training will make it easier to return, does not
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necessarily follow. In 2008, the Learning and Skills Council ( ) commissioned
a telephone survey of 10 000 learners who had taken courses provided for the
unemployed (Casebourne, 2008). It found that for unemployed people in
general, the training provided did lead to a modest improvement in peopleʼs
chances of getting back to work, but that this benefit was much reduced by age.
For older people, training improved self-confidence and wellbeing, but courses
on their own had little effect on employability, because employers still tend to
see employing an older person as a higher risk.
What has been shown to work, usually on a small scale, is training linked
to work placement or to very specific needs, organised in conjunction with
particular sectors. Pilot projects in the south-east in care and security (both
sectors with current labour shortages) offered unemployed older people an
introduction to a sector which they had never considered before. They were
given short training to provide background knowledge of the sector, a set of
basic, sector specific, skills and knowledge, and a guaranteed trial work

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( ) The LSC was the national agency funding most publicly-funded vocational education (replaced in
2010).