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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