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CHAPTER 11
Maintaining senior employment: some lessons from best practices in France 219

conditions needed to enable training as well as the monitoring and
assessment thereof;
(e) provide employees with the conditions needed to overcome complex work
situations together: this may require modification of work situations to help
learning, to simulate them, in particular when real-life work situations do
not enable knowledge transfer, due for instance to productivity constraints
or quality requirements, or to analyse real-life work situations, to
guarantee learning. These ways of doing refer to Barbierʼs (1992) typology
on training through and in work.
Success factors related to work organisation and management are:
(a) management practices that ease and encourage cooperation and sharing
best practices in work teams (availability, ability to work as a team
member, time spaces for talking about work and the difficulties it holds);
(b) flexible and empowering work organisation, conducive to learning;
(c) recognition of skills gained and transfer undertaking.

Outcomes and steps requiring extra care with regard
to the senior population
The granule mining company, like most companies in the quarries and
materials sector that have tested this approach, secured very positive results
by providing support for the knowledge transfer process, in particular through
support for mentors (new skills developed, apparently more quickly, in
employees who benefited from the programme) and by employees (mentors
felt more comfortable in performing their tasks).
For older employees selected to act as mentors, several effects were
observed, which contributed to better self-image, greater motivation or less
duress during this latter portion of their careers: the skills they had gained
through experience were optimised, they saw it was important that they pass
on their expertise before leaving, they were assigned to long-term mentoring
projects, those with medical restrictions were able to enjoy tailored working
conditions at career-end, intergenerational cooperation was improved and older
workers were able to move to other jobs once their skills had been transferred.
This programme, which was not only open to older employees, none the
less offers insight into the points to watch for when dealing with this population:
(a) great importance needs to be attached to mobilisation of relevant
employees: some processes almost failed because mentors, with
retirement looming a few years ahead, wondered about what kind of future
they might still have in the company following the transfer, or felt
inadequately recognised by the company up to that point. Employees