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CHAPTER 11
Maintaining senior employment: some lessons from best practices in France 207

a job, without giving them opportunities to change (Gazier, 2009).
The wide range of situations possible, whether with respect to the
characteristics of the work environment (employment conditions, conditions
for carrying out work, in connection with management and recognition
methods), or the individualʼs characteristics (abilities, potential, professional
desire) necessarily entail complex and multifaceted interactions and, as a
result, various practices.
In any case, in these interactions lies the core of worker employability
(defined as exclusion versus integration), which will be described in the study
as a combination of three broadly-spanning dimensions, as already developed
in Savereux et al. (1999), namely:
(a) health: is there a risk that companiesʼ practices deteriorate employee
health or do they help preserve or even foster it;
(b) skills: do administration and management practices in place contribute to
devaluing employee skills or do they foster skills development;
(c) professional commitment: do companiesʼ practices cause employees to
maintain a distance and thus also look to retire as early as possible, or do
they foster employee commitment throughout careers?
Figure 11.1 depicts representation of employability, used as the matrix for
analysing the approaches considered.

Figure 11.1. Representation of employability

Conditions Conditions Management,
of completion of work of employment working relationships

C Characteristics
Characteristicsharacteristics
o of the work environment
of the work environmentf the work environment
Health preservation
Conducive - Skills development + Conducive
to eviction to integration
Professional commitent stimulation
E Employee
Employeemployee
characteristicsharacteristics
c characteristics

Abilities Potential Professional desire

Source: ANACT.