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Working and ageing
140 Guidance and counselling for mature learners

produce the most comprehensive adult careers guidance service ever created
in the UK, building on the very extensive online and telephone services
developed over recent years, to provide support face to face, by telephone
and online.
The new service aims to be universal, open to all, whether or not they are
(or seek to be), in the active labour market. However, there is clearly a risk
that, especially in a time of financial constraint, it will fail to address the needs
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of people approaching labour market exit ( ). If the focus on adults was lost
it would be regrettable, since it is clear that a major policy priority is to enable
people to make best use of the final years of their working lives, and to make
smooth and rewarding transitions into active retirement.
The evidence described in this chapter suggests that an effective strategy
for the older labour market might include three key elements to which careers
guidance and training could contribute:
(a) preventative guidance and training aimed at ensuring that people currently
in work, but especially those most at risk (who have low skills and who
have been a long time with the same employer or job), understand the
likely length of their working lives and the risks they will face in their 50s
of premature exit and inability to return. There are models in other
European countries which may have lessons for the UK, notably the
Finnish workability model, which provides a holistic assessment of the
match between job and worker to anticipate and correct problems likely
to lead to early retirement (Ilmarinen, 1999). Another systematic model is
the French bilan des competences which provides the individual with a
systematic assessment of strengths, weaknesses and potential (Cedefop,
2010);
(b) guidance to help unemployed older people to return to work which makes
appropriate use of their skills. Individuals need guidance to explore their
strengths and aspirations in the context of the local labour market (since
older workers are usually less mobile than younger ones) to explore
precisely what saleable skills and knowledge they have and how these
might be improved by learning of some kind. These strategies imply a
closer link between guidance and training. A key task for guidance workers
is to help individuals to manage the damage to self-confidence caused by
redundancy and repeated rejections of job applications. But this needs to

( ) As a result of government reductions on public expenditure, some services for young people have
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been closed for lack of funding before the new service could be set up.