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Working and ageing
80 Guidance and counselling for mature learners

significant differences were found between employees with HRD portfolios of
low, medium and high formality, and any of the employability dimensions.
It was also supposed that employees with a larger HRD portfolio perceived
themselves as significantly more employable than employees with a smaller
one. On average, employees participated in 2.57 activities (SD=1.49). HRD
portfolios that comprised three or more activities were classified as large while
HRD portfolios with two or less were defined as small. Based on this
classification, 82 employees (63%) belonged to the group with small HRD
portfolios and 48 employees belonged to the group with a large HRD portfolio.
Univariate analyses showed no significant differences between employees
with large or small HRD portfolios with regard to any employability dimensions.

Age as a moderating variable
It was further hypothesised that the HRD portfolio of older workers with
younger supervisors was significantly smaller and less formal than the HRD
portfolio of older workers with same-aged supervisors. The group of older
employees with a younger supervisor constituted 3.1% of the whole sample.
The group of older employees with older supervisors was 35.4%. Of the
remaining group of respondents, 12.3% could not be categorised as a dyad
since they had removed the tracking code needed to determine the age of the
supervisor and/or had failed to indicate their own age, 3.8% were younger
employees with a young supervisor, and 45.4% were younger employees with
older supervisors. However, no differences were found between the dyads.
Also no significant differences concerning the formality of HRD portfolios were
found between any of the groups. A Bonferroni pairwise comparison showed
that there is no significant difference in formality between older workers with
older and younger employees.

4.6. Conclusion and discussion

Findings of the two studies point to the importance of various factors which
affect employability of ageing workers. These could help companies to develop
and implement relevant strategies. Based on Breukersʼ findings, it can be
concluded that focusing on measures to improve older workersʼ motivation and
ability to learn would be an important step towards a higher employable
workforce. Regarding organisational factors, we, unexpectedly, found that job
rotation without salary increase appears to be negatively related to one
dimension of employability, personal flexibility. This could be because