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                          Working and ageing
                      194  Guidance and counselling for mature learners





                         satisfaction: older workers showed a greater decrease in job satisfaction than
                         younger workers. Can this be explained by older people being more likely to
                         feel trapped within their jobs, or does it correlate with the more certain sense
                         of oneʼs own values, as expressed by our respondents?
                           What can be drawn from this to help careers advisers in their work with
                         clients? A first requirement is for careers advisers to be familiar with these
                         ideas so they can acknowledge and validate expressions of experience and
                         personal values offered by their clients. The next step, and one articulated in
                         the project report (Barham, 2008), is to help their clients in interpreting and
                         conveying to others that these are positive attributes, and of relevance to
                         employers.

                         10.2.3.  Giving back: from ambition to generativity
                         Respondents to our study wanted to give something back. Molly, unemployed
                         at age 57 but actively engaged in voluntary work, comments: ʻI do it to feel
                         wanted. Itʼs a blow when society says “we donʼt need you any more”ʼ. But
                         finding a way to contribute is not easy. Paul, discovering painfully at 51 that
                         the IT industry may be an ageist area of employment, is now looking more
                         broadly. Advised long ago by his school that computer science would make
                         good use of his maths ability, he now feels that he has never really made any
                         big career decisions. He wants to ʻput something back into societyʼ but without
                         a ʻroad to Damascusʼ moment, cannot work out what that might be or how to
                         tackle the decision. (Barham, 2008, p. 16-17).
                           Kanfer and Ackerman (2004) examine age-related changes through four
                         themes: loss; growth (particularly related to patterns of intellectual abilities),
                         reorganisation and exchange. Reorganisation and exchange particularly apply
                         to aspects of motivation which shift as time orientation shifts from ʻlife lived
                         since birthʼ to ʻlife left until deathʼ (Kanfer and Ackerman, 2004, p. 444). For
                         many people, ambition gives way to a concern for giving something back, and
                         is linked with a decline in work centrality for many (but not all) older people
                         (Clark and Arnold, 2007).
                           Both Kanfer and Ackerman (2004) and Clark and Arnold (2010) draw upon
                         Eriksonʼs (1959; 1997) work on identity throughout the life cycle, which has
                         received more attention for the concepts of identity formation and identity crisis
                         in earlier life stages than for the notion of generativity which he argues to be
                         a dominant concern of later adulthood. Generativity is explained by Kanfer
                         and Ackerman as referring ʻto a class of tendencies pertaining to caring for
                         others, parenting, and helping the broader society and future generationsʼ
                         (2004, p. 445). Eriksonʼs delineation of generativity includes its antithesis of
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